The new novel from Booker-shortlisted Elif Shafak uses a single drop of water to connect three lives, two great rivers and a lost poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh. There are Rivers in the Sky opens in a palace, “by the River Tigris, in olden times”. Then the world’s largest and wealthiest city, Nineveh is ruled by King Ashurbanipal, a learned, cultured man who is “no less cruel than his predecessors”.
His library is guarded by lamassus; monumental stone creatures with the head of a human, the body of a bull, and bird’s wings. The king knows that to dominate other cultures, “you must capture not only their lands, crops and assets, but also their collective imagination, their shared memories”.
A drop of water falls on to Ashurbanipal’s head. Centuries later, the same drop falls in Victorian London, where a boy born into poverty at the edge of the Thames is jokingly named King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums. Arthur is exceptionally clever, and when he is apprenticed to a printer, a book called Nineveh and Its Remains changes the trajectory of his extraordinary life. Next we meet Narin, a Yazidi girl living by the Tigris in 2014. Her baptism ceremony is violently interrupted, forcing her and grandmother to flee for their lives. The last of Shafak’s central characters is a hydrologist, Dr Zaleekhah Clarke. Newly separated from her husband, Zaleekhah moves to a houseboat in London. She is secretly working on an article about “water memory”, but is scared to share it for fear the scientific community will ridicule her.
The risk with multiple overlapping narratives is that the reader can become more invested in one. The pace of the longer descriptive passages is slower than the character-driven sections, but no less forceful or imaginative.
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This novel moves between continents, centuries, cultures and communities with intelligence and ease. Shafak raises big ideas around artefacts and ownership of cultural heritage and handles them with care – such as her depiction of the lamassus, which become smaller and more fragile with each new incarnation. There are Rivers in the Sky is a tribute to the power of language. As Arthur’s employer says, “You never know whom those words will reach, whose hearts will succumb to their sweet songs”.
