There Are Rivers in the Sky review: Elif Shafak’s sweeping tale born of a water drop

One single drop of water. It takes into its crosshairs Ashurbanipal, the erudite but tyrant Assyrian king who loves heroic stories about himself but distrusts storytellers as their imagination could be unpredictable and untamed. Arthur Smyth, that autodidact genius with phenomenal memory who grew up by the Thames but who would visit Mesopotamia to rummage, retrieve and bring out the Epic of Gilgamesh to the world and where he would encounter the violent persecution of the Yazidis. Narin, the young Yazidi girl who is soon going to be deaf, is tied to the apron-strings and story-strings of her grandmother, who must tell her stories about the way Yazidis have been and how their world is coming apart with the violent ascendency of ISIS. Zaleekhah Clarke, a descendant of migrants from Mesopotamia in London, a scientist who believes water has memories, studying water and living in a houseboat on the Thames after a marriage on the rocks. Shafak — through the centrality of water — seeks to tie together their stories in an expansive narrative.

A plea for rivers’ pristineness

This story centres on the permanence of water against the evanescence of power. But power has the temerity to think that it could order Water to behave, could ride roughshod over it, could colonise it, could deny it to the enemies, could play havoc with the course of rivers and then the murderous mayhem follows. Water in the novel is both a metaphor and a lived reality. So Shafak writes at some length about the lost rivers of London which have been covered, diverted, destroyed — atop which lie urban centres. And she writes a great deal about the Tigris which once anchored and nurtured a great civilization but which has been turned into a cockpit of violent contestation. The Thames — in her view — is a zombie...“the river that returned from the dead.” Against this background, the title of the novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky, seems to be a plea for how rivers should have been — like clouds, like raindrops hanging precariously from those roving clouds and selflessly agnostic about where they fall.

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The common thread to all the four protagonists is the Mesopotamian connection. But it is the characterisation of Narin and Arthur that holds the novel together. Narin — the Yazidi girl — is soon going to lose her hearing. The Mosul Dam is going to devastate and destroy the Yazidis, suffering from embedded xenophobia, and the violent rise of ISIS is set to inflict terrible violence upon them. Shafak writes with helpless empathy, “Someday Narin’s hearing will disappear — just like the land she has always known as home.” Against this background, both Narin’s grandmother and her father sound optimistic, even defiantly optimistic. Her musician father gathers his wits against ominous portents and rationalises, “.... People need songs like they need bread and water. They need poetry, beauty, love!... Even fanatics can’t change that.”

Her grandmother is wiser and more matter-of-fact, “Memory is all we have. If you want to know who you are, you need to learn the stories of your ancestors. Since time immemorial, Yazidis have been misunderstood, maligned, mistreated.” The violent denouement would come on Mount Sinjar where the helpless Yazidis would find themselves besieged — hungry, thirsty and intimations of death approaching ever closer. Narin’s grandmother gives the last drop of water she has so carefully guarded to Narin. “She has no way of knowing, but the last drop on Mount Sinjar in August 2014 is the same one that fell on Nineveh one stormy afternoon, thousands of years back, settling in the hair of King Ashurbanipal,” dramatises Shafak.

‘Piecing together the broken’

Arthur Smith’s presence in the novel seeks — at one level — to demonstrate the terms of interaction between England, the colonial power and old Mesopotamia, now part of a melancholic Ottoman Empire, and the former is only expected to be extractive in its designs. At another level, Arthur — given his phenomenal prowess for decoding and deciphering the lost scripts in the Mesopotamian tablets — would undertake journeys to Mesopotamia where he would experience the violent treatment of the Yazidis and explore love with a native Yazidi which would remain unrequited.

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Starting his life from the margins of uncertainty and slogging in a printing press where he distinguishes himself, his final calling is piecing together “what has been broken, to help people to remember what has been consigned to oblivion....he wishes to be like the river Thames: tending to what has been discarded, damaged and forgotten.” And Gilgamesh that he manages to piece together is a callous brute who is hubris personified at the start but who is ultimately debased and humbled by failure. But when he visits Mesopotamia, he realises how no one learns anything from history and how minorities — in this case Yazidis — find themselves at the receiving end of the prejudices and hatred of the majority community.

Zaleekhah Clarke — descendant of Mesopotamian migrants in London, and chapters involving her — are underwhelming and fail to segue organically into the overall narrative of the novel. Orphaned early, she is brought up by her affluent uncle who nurses the pangs of segregation in the new land (“We are never the heroes in their stories. Always the villains. And if not, the sidekicks. Sancho Panza to Don Quixote...”), researching water with conviction that water has memories. Her marriage in shambles, she stays on a Thames houseboat and sort of finds a soulmate in Nen, a tattooist, who too is fond of Mesopotamian images from antiquity.

For such an overarching narrative that moves back and forth through time and space, not all the characters are fully fleshed out. While the Narin section receives detailed treatment, the one involving Zaleekhah feels contrived and, at times, out of place. The threads attempting to link past and present occasionally snap. The centrality of water to the narrative often feels too deliberate. Yet, as Arthur hopes that the Epic of Gilgamesh will be read, appreciated, and studied by enthusiasts on every continent, this novel by Shafak deserves to be read as well.