Book Review of There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
This sweeping epic connects ancient Nineveh, a Victorian Gilgamesh scholar, a Yazidi girl & a melancholy scientist through the Rivers Thames & Tigris. It questions the antiquities trade, water pollution & genocide amid intricate, lush prose.
London, 1840. Arthur is born into poverty by the banks of the river Thames, yet his prodigious memory enables him to become a scholar of cuneiform, language of ancient Ninevah and the 4000 year old epic of Gilgamesh.
River Tigris, 2014. Narin, a young Yazidi girl, travels across war-torn lands with her grandmother.
London, 2018. Heartbroken hydrologist Zaleekah moves into a houseboat, but then unexpectedly connects to her homeland.
These three characters are connected by water, and the history and language of Ninevah, once in Mesopotamia, now part of modern Iraq. Each one embarks on a journey with unexpected dangers. Their paths rarely cross, but all three unearth the wonders of ancient Ninevah, now polluted and ravaged by conflict.
I listened to Elif Shafak at a recent talk, explaining that Middle Eastern storytelling is different from the Western tradition. With a close connection to nature, it follows a meandering view of time, layering up a treasure box of stories to make its argument.
There are Rivers in the Sky does appear to follow this pattern, twisting and turning like a mature river in a wide valley before the characters stories’ connect. Shafak plays with the theme of the circularity of water and rivers and points out the hypocrisy of Victorian – and modern – collectors, and the damage that industry and economic development causes to waterways.
But there is plenty of joy in the novel: in Arthur’s ascent into Victorian academic society, Narin learning about her history from her beloved grandmother, and Zaleekah finding new purpose through serendipitous friendship. It prompted me to seek out the lamassu in the British Museum, and a friend even enrolled in a course on cuneiform.
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