Book Review by Pat Allchorne: There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
This is the second of Elif Shafak’s books that I have read, and once again I am stunned by her poetic prose, her extensive knowledge of places and mythology, and her sheer imagination. This takes some concentration, as it covers three time zones this time, each clearly marked.
The stories are woven around two rivers: the Thames and the Tigris, and a raindrop which starts its life -in this story, at least, over 2000 years ago. Elif tells us right near the start that each drop of water has many lives; one raindrop will eventually be absorbed back into the atmosphere and enter another cloud and fall again who knows where.
We begin in ancient Mesopotamia, in Nineveh, by the Tigris, in the time of the cruel king Ashurbanipal. We then move to the mid-nineteenth century, to 1840, to London and the Thames, and a baby born a month early to a young woman who ekes a living by toshing, digging in the murky slime on the river bank for anything which can be sold, however small. The mother, in despair as to how she can keep a baby, refuses to name him, and it is the other toshers who christen him Arthur, short for King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums.
Back to the Tigris, to modern-day Turkey in 2014, where we meet Narin, by the river about to be baptised. She is nine years old, an orphan, brought up by her grandmother. The baptism is interrupted by a man with a bulldozer, flattening the surrounding land for a dam-building scheme authorised by the government. Narin and the rest of the baptism group are known as devil-worshippers, Yazidis, the only twelve remaining in that area after the rest have been driven from their homes in the name of development.
Our final introduction is to Zaleekhah, an environmental scientist specialising in hydrology, who lives in modern-day London in 2018. She has left her marriage and is about to move into a houseboat on the Thames. This is to be temporary as she has suicidal plans for a month or so.
Arthur, despite his poor start in life, has an extraordinary mind. He is intelligent, loves learning, and has synaesthesia. Words have different tastes to him. When he leaves the ragged school and gets a job at a printer’s, his world enlarges beyond his imagination. As he sees the book “Nineveh and its Remains”, we begin to see the first link with the place mentioned at the start of our story.
Arthur’s inquisitive mind coupled with his extraordinary ability to remember facts and dates bring him to the notice firstly of the printer, then of the Keeper of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum, where Arthur meets stone tablets inscribed with cuneiform. Nobody has been able to translate these, but with dogged diligence Arthur does, and finds pieces of the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, with a significant part missing. Thus his long desire to visit Nineveh is fed, and eventually, as a young man, he travels abroad.
Zaleekhah, meanwhile, is trying to prove a theory that her old professor was working on, which lost him his job as it was so outlandish: that water has aquatic memory, with each drop of water unique and essentially unchanged despite being diluted many times.
It is unclear for some time just how these four people are connected; Ashurbanipal, in 630 BC, obviously introduces the Mesopotamian lands and culture, but then he virtually disappears from the story apart from allusions to his palace, his collection of artefacts and the lamassus there, giant statues which have the head of a man, the body of a lion and the wings of an eagle.
Two-thirds of the way through the book we see a connection between two of the main protagonists, but it is not until the very end that we see how the other main protagonist fits in with them. In the notes to the reader, Elif cites numerous reference books which she read to research the material for this story; the amount of reading she must have done is overwhelming, but it has resulted in an epic story with characters so different from each other but connected by water. She covers the genocide in the Middle East in the nineteenth century and the one in recent years, and it is not always easy reading, but her way with words is unique; her ability to paint word pictures that draw one in is exquisite.
The printer for whom Arthur works tells him:
“Words are like birds. When you publish books, you are setting caged birds free. They can go wherever they please. They can fly over the highest walls and across vast distances, settling in the mansions of the gentry, in farmsteads and labourers’ cottages alike. You never know whom those words will reach, whose hearts will succumb to their sweet songs.”
I hope the words of this book touch your heart as they did mine.
From the Booker Prize finalist author of The Island of Missing Trees, an enchanting new tale about three characters living along two rivers, all under the shadow of one of the greatest epic poems of all time.
In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives.
In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains.
In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time.
In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything.
A dazzling feat of storytelling, There Are Rivers in the Sky entwines these outsiders with a single drop of water, a drop which remanifests across the centuries. Both a source of life and harbinger of death, rivers—the Tigris and the Thames—transcend history, transcend fate: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR | WEBSITE
Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish novelist and the most widely read female author in Turkey.
She writes in both Turkish and English, and has published seventeen books, eleven of which are novels. Her work has been translated into fifty languages. Shafak holds a PhD in political science and she has taught at various universities in Turkey, the US and the UK, including St Anne's College, Oxford University, where she is an honorary fellow. She is a member of Weforum Global Agenda Council on Creative Economy and a founding member of ECFR (European Council on Foreign Relations).
An advocate for women's rights, LGBT rights and freedom of speech, Shafak is an inspiring public speaker and twice a TED Global speaker, each time receiving a standing ovation. Shafak contributes to major publications around the world and she has been awarded the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. In 2017 she was chosen by Politico as one of the twelve people who would make the world better. She has judged numerous literary prizes and is chairing the Wellcome Prize 2019.
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