There Are Rivers in the Sky
This is the story of a drop of water. Short? No.
Ranging widely through space and time—like water—British-Turkish novelist Elif Shafak begins her new book with a Mesopotamian tyrant, moves to a Victorian archaeologist, and expands from there to include two contemporary characters, a Middle Eastern child and a floundering young British woman.
Two rivers run through it: the Tigris and the Thames. The main characters are Arthur, an intellectual born in the London slums; Narin, a non-Muslim Yazidi; and Zaleekhah, a water scientist of Middle Eastern heritage. As in a Victorian novel, various vivid secondary characters orbit around Arthur, Narin, and Zaleekhah, all three of whom that same water droplet touches in different ways.
A rich variety of other symbols link them, too: the ancient city of Nineveh, located in current Iraq; the epic of Gilgamesh; a rare lapis lazuli tablet; the fantastic Assyrian man//bull/eagle figures called lamassus, the cuneiform symbol for water; and Nisaba, the Mesopotamian goddess of writing… and of grain. Glorious but tragic, the Middle East also links them. The cradle of civilization is, and often has been, the scene of terrible conflict and brutality, which affects all three main characters, as does the dark side of water—pollution, floods, drought, thirst.
“The story of humanity cannot be written without the story of water,” declares Arthur, perhaps the most fascinating character in the novel (and based on an actual Victorian prodigy). Shafak’s impressive research adds constant color to the text. So does her prose, decorated with frequent aphorisms and (always interesting) lists. The three stories of this modern epic ultimately converge and end. But as Shafak concludes, “The rivers in the sky… never cease to flow.”
