‘There Are Rivers in the Sky’ by Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak writes with her heart as much as her imagination writes Brian Tanguay of the California Review of Books. Her eye and ear seem to gravitate toward characters whose stories are rarely told: women, religious minorities, the displaced and despised, the persecuted. 

Her latest novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky, opens in Nineveh, on the east bank of the Tigris river, where a powerful monarch reigns over an opulent city that will shortly be inundated with flood waters and completely submerged. 

Water, along with the epic poem Gilgamesh and the half human, half animal Lamassus, a creature with the head of a man, the wings of a bird, and the body of a bull, are the recurring motifs of this tale. As she is so adept at doing, Shafak shifts seamlessly between locales and time periods, Iraq and London, the Tigris and the Thames, the Victorian era to the present day. 

The first protagonist we encounter is Arthur, born into extreme poverty in a London slum near the banks of the Thames. The river runs heavy with London’s effluent, garbage, and filth. Arthur’s fellow slum dwellers christen him, King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums. 

The moniker will follow him to his grave. He’s a child of the river. If not for innate intelligence and a prodigious memory, Arthur’s fate might have followed that of many poor children — a short, miserable life ending in an early death. 

In the Middle East, 9-year-old Narin learns about the natural world and her Yazidi heritage from the stories her grandmother tells her. Narin will not be able to hear these stories for long because a rare genetic disease will soon render her deaf, though this is the least of the predicaments she and her family face. 

When the dam being built near their village is completed, it will wash away their home and history, the graveyard where their ancestors are buried. As members of the hated Yazidi minority, they’re powerless to stop the dam any more than they can escape persecution by the Islamic State. 

Shifting back to London we encounter Zaleekhah, a hydrogeologist by training, who has just separated from her husband and taken up residence on a houseboat on the Thames; she’s experiencing a crisis of purpose so severe that she’s not sure she wants to live. Her wealthy uncle and aunt, wildly successful immigrants who raised Zaleekhah after her parents drowned in a flood, will never approve of what she’s done. 

A series of fortuitous events allow Arthur to escape his dismal surroundings. Securing employment in a prominent printing house, he meets none other than Charles Dickens. Then, by way of his fascination with ancient Mesopotamia, he lands a post at the British Museum where he works with ancient clay tablets. Writing in his journal, Arthur notes: “I wish to be like the River Thames: I want to tend to what has been discarded, damaged and forgotten.” 

Through meticulous and painstaking labor, Arthur uncovers proof that the epic of Gilgamesh predates the Bible, a discovery that propels him into London society and spreads his fame from the European continent to the other side of the Atlantic. Soon, the boy from the London slums is on his way to Mesopotamia in search of artifacts buried beneath what was once Nineveh. 

Unlike British and French archeologists of the time, Arthur doesn’t believe he’s entitled to take what he unearths back to London and the British Museum. What gives him the right to someone else’s history and culture? He’s fascinated by the fractured history the Tigris holds. He studies Kurdish and spends time in a Yazidi settlement where he meets Leila, a healer and storyteller, and the ancestor of Narin. In Leila’s presence, Arthur feels a bliss he has never known. 

As in her other novels, Shafak doesn’t shy away from brutality or tragedy. For the poor and downtrodden, the Victorian Era was cruel, a time of rampant disease, child labor, pollution, and widespread deprivation. The Islamic State killed thousands of Yazidis in Iraq and northern Syria in 2014 and sold women and girls into slavery all across the Middle East. 

This is the fate that befalls Narin when she is sold for $3,200, the going rate for a human being on the day the transaction is settled. Not only does the Islamic State kidnap, murder, and rape, it also loots antiquities for trade at enormous profit. Stolen treasures wind up in the hands of art dealers and wealthy individuals in New York, Paris, London, Tokyo, and Berlin.

Like the cycle of water, these intertwined stories flow and shift from darkness to light, flood to drought, past to present, from the worst that people are capable of to their very best. Elif Shafak weaves a magnificent and spellbinding story.