Book Review: ‘There Are Rivers in the Sky,’ by Elif Shafak - The New York Times

Fiction

Elif Shafak’s new novel, “There Are Rivers in the Sky,” follows the same drop of water from the Tigris to the Thames, from antiquity to the 19th century to today.

By Stephen Markley

Stephen Markley is the author of the novels “Ohio” and “The Deluge.”

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THERE ARE RIVERS IN THE SKY, by Elif Shafak

However water first arrived on Earth — we still don’t really know — every drop in our bodies today is the original stuff. Water has seen it all: the rise and fall of every self-important species, every empire, every catastrophe, collapse and extinction. That water-drop perspective guides the premise of “There Are Rivers in the Sky,” the engaging and melancholy new novel by Elif Shafak in which a single water molecule falls upon characters spanning centuries.

The novel journeys between the two rivers, the Tigris and the Thames, from Mesopotamia to London and back again, beginning with the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. The learned tyrant murders, tortures and wages endless war all while gripping the tablet of his favorite poem, “The Epic of Gilgamesh.” This story of humanity’s first great antihero will echo across millenniums, even as Ashurbanipal’s empire disintegrates. The storm comes and the flood begins, “for, unlike humans, water has no regard for social status or royal titles.”

Ashurbanipal’s vignette only sets the table, however, for the three main protagonists. The first is Arthur Smyth, a polymath born into London’s worst slums at their industrially polluted zenith in the 1840s. Arthur suffers from hyperthymesia, the rare ability to remember staggering amounts of one’s life in vivid, suffocating detail. He follows an unlikely path from the city’s “sewers and slums” to working in the British Museum where by chance he Good-Will-Huntings the cuneiform tablets of the Assyrian Empire. He becomes obsessed with ancient Nineveh and makes it his life’s work to unearth the secrets of this long-gone civilization.

Jumping from 19th-century London to Turkey in 2014, we find Narin, a young Yazidi girl who is slowly going deaf. She lives with her family in Hasankeyf, where a massive dam is about to block the Tigris and submerge the ancient town and its archaeological history. With this stretch of the Tigris endangered, Narin’s grandmother decides to take her to Iraq for her baptism just as the first murmurs of the terrorist group ISIS echo across the region.

Finally, Dr. Zaleekhah Clarke is a hydrologist in 2018 who’s going through a divorce, halfheartedly suicidal and vexed by a relationship with her more traditional uncle, who raised her after the death of her parents. Zaleekhah gives us a full-spectrum overview of humanity’s troubled relationship to water: “Even after all these years of studying it, water never ceases to surprise her, astonishingly resilient but also acutely vulnerable — a drying, dying force.”

There is many a meditation on water throughout the novel, but Zaleekhah’s chapters anchor the author’s preoccupation as we follow the character down fascinating rabbit holes like the lost rivers of London — diverted, destroyed or straight-jacketed in concrete. Some of the novel’s best passages explores this curiosity about the materiality of water and what our species has done with it.

Shafak’s language often takes on the cadence of a fable, a poetic rhythm that can vary between beauty and a tendency to hold the reader’s hand. The themes are spoken plainly and repeated: ecology, persecution, memory and mental health ring throughout. This stylistic choice causes a distinct sagging in Narin’s sections, as two thirds of her story is framed mostly as a running Q. and A. between the girl and her grandmother. This aphorism-packed dialogue contains interesting nuggets of Yazidi history — and Narin’s character finally feels embodied with the arrival of ISIS late in the book — but her section never feels as dynamic or lived-in as the rest of the novel.

Arthur’s sections, on the other hand, soar with vivid, Dickensian detail (Dickens himself even makes a winking cameo), summoning the pleasure of falling away into another time and place. Based on the Assyriologist George Smith, Arthur makes his fascination with Nineveh, and its clay tablets that tell a story “as old as recorded time,” ours too. With gorgeous writing throughout and many particularly stunning paragraphs that you’ll want to mark up and return to, these are the moments when “There Are Rivers in the Sky” explodes into a roaring journey through ecology and memory.

Of course, the success of a novel this sprawling has much to do with how the author lands the plane. Some of the connections between these various threads are more rewarding than others. When the puzzle pieces fit into place, and the fates of the present-day characters collide, the final twist is both contrived and genuinely moving.

Shafak asks us to think of water as not a resource but a companion, to imagine its precious, ancient story. She reminds us that the story of written language, from the counting of cereal crops to the first epic tale of a deluge, was born from the water feeding the harvests of Mesopotamia and used to mold the first cuneiform tablets. She reminds us, powerfully, of the material nature of human thought and culture, the continuity of time and the proximity of our ancestors.

THERE ARE RIVERS IN THE SKY | By Elif Shafak | Knopf | 444 pp. | $30