…and thus her gift – the art of writing – will always represent a desire to efface dualities, dissolve hierarchies and transcend boundaries.
These words about Nisaba, an ancient goddess of writing, from the British-Turkish writer Elif Shafak’s new novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky, apply just as easily to the author. In this book, Shafak burnishes her reputation as a supreme storyteller. She displays profound wisdom and empathy, and encyclopaedic knowledge of the mythology of the part of the world in which she was raised. She enthrals us, all the while opening our eyes to how the sweep of nature, geography, culture, politics and religion have shaped humans throughout our history, influencing where we live, how we think, the ways in which we understand and, more often, misunderstand each other; whom we worship, love and hate.
In the hands of a less accomplished writer, this multi-layered, time- and space-spanning story might have collapsed under its own weight. It is a tribute to Shafak’s skill that though it teeters at times, it never falls.
The novel weaves backwards and forwards across the centuries from London to modern-day Turkey and Iraq, via old Mesopotamia. It is, however, firmly rooted in ancient times, opening in 640 BC, in the city of Nineveh, part of what is now Mosul in northern Iraq, on the eastern bank of the River Tigris. The Tigris is one of two rivers – the Thames the other – which anchor the story and shape the lives of the main characters.
In Nineveh we meet King Ashurbanipal, a monarch whose cruelty and barbarity is eclipsed in history by his erudition and love of culture. At the heart of his royal palace is a vast library of early clay-tablet “books”. The library is guarded by protective spirits known as lamassus – limestone sculptures with the head of a human, the body of a lion and the wings of a bird. A glimpse of one of these stone beasts, as it arrives at the British Museum in the mid-19th century, seeds an obsession with Nineveh and its remains in the mind of Arthur, one of the book’s three main characters. It is an obsession that dominates and ultimately ends his life.
The lamassus introduce us to the questions and dilemmas around cultural appropriation, which stalk the pages of this book – who owns the past and the art it bequeaths to us? In these early pages we also encounter two guiding motifs – a raindrop and an ancient poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh. These recur throughout the story, stitching the different pieces of it together, and connecting the characters.
In the raindrop, we find one of the book’s dominant themes: water and our relationship to it. Water sustains but also destroys us. Rivers shape lives, cities, civilisations. Man-made attempts to direct and control water – constructing dams, for example – wipe out communities and ways of life. Human pollution of rivers and seas destroys ecosystems and degrades the planet. The book issues an urgent call to treat the world’s water with greater respect. The raindrop “will slowly evaporate”, Shafak writes:
But it won’t disappear. Sooner or later, that tiny translucent bead of water will ascend back to the blue skies. Once there it will bide its time, waiting to return to the troubled earth again… and again. Water remembers. It is humans who forget.
In other words, humankind’s failure to listen to and learn from the mistakes of the past consigns us to repeating them, time and again. It is a message that echoes through the experiences of her characters.
The raindrop that lands on the head of King Ashurbanipal and nestles there as he cradles the rare, and controversial, edition of the Epic of Gilgamesh which forms the centrepiece of his library, reappears almost 3,000 years later in the form of a snowflake falling on the tongue of newly born Arthur. He comes into the world in 1840, living in extreme poverty on the banks of the Thames. His mother is a tosher – someone who scavenges from the river. Her fellow workers, deciding that he needs a name to elevate him in life, christen him King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums. He is a gifted child with a photographic memory. He becomes obsessed with Nineveh and discovers that he can decipher cuneiform, the ancient script in which the Epic of Gilgamesh is written. A job at the British Museum, sorting and translating excavated fragments of the tablets on which it is carved, leads him on a journey to the Middle East to find the missing pieces.
It is here that he meets Leila, the great-great-grandmother of Shafak’s second key character, Narin. Leila is a faqra, a diviner of the future. She belongs to the persecuted Yazidi population which, in the period between Arthur’s two visits to Nineveh, falls victim to a brutal genocidal attack, leaving him bereft and questioning everything he once believed in.
We encounter nine-year-old Narin in Turkey in 2014, as she is baptised on the banks of the Tigris. The raindrop is now the first splash of baptismal water that falls on her head. Her family’s home is being destroyed by the building of a dam and her baptism is interrupted by a construction worker hurling sectarian abuse. Yazidis are derided as “devil-worshippers”. Her family then embark on a pilgrimage to Iraq to complete her baptism. It is here that they fall victim to Islamic State’s brutal persecution of the Yazidis. Men are murdered, women raped, children enslaved.
To detail the connection that later emerges between Narin and the third of the main characters, Zaleekhah, would spoil the plot. It is a link that at first glance seems slightly contrived, but it is not incredible.
Zaleekhah is a hydrologist, living in London. As a child, she lost her parents in a flash flood in the Middle East. The rich uncle who took her in collects ancient artefacts. Fleeing an unhappy marriage, she moves into a houseboat on the Thames. It is from a tap there that she drinks a glass of water containing the raindrop in its latest incarnation. The woman who owns the boat, Nen, is a tattoo artist who specialises in cuneiform and nurtures a deep interest in the ancient words of Gilgamesh. It is with Nen – the first woman she kisses – that Zaleekhah finally finds love and a sense of peace to assuage the trauma of her parents’ deaths.
The novel explores a multitude of themes – the stultifying effect of poverty on the human spirit; the dislocation felt by migrants far away from home; the existential threat of climate change; the distortion of religion and the prejudice it gives rise to; the power of storytelling; the treatment of women through the ages.
What Elif Shafak excels at, though, is making us understand that, despite the many ways humanity divides itself, we are all connected – by nature and also by the stories we pass from generation to generation. If we learned the lessons of history, respected and listened to the nature that sustains us, the world we live in would be a better place. Through all of her writing – and certainly in this remarkable novel – she effaces dualities, dissolves hierarchies and transcends boundaries. There Are Rivers in the Sky is a difficult book to categorise. It will make you think, cry, rage – and hope. It is Elif Shafak at her best.
There Are Rivers in the Sky
Elif Shafak
Viking, 496pp, £18.99
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[See also: Slavoj Žižek’s war with the left]
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