To write a novel on water, Elif Shafak has turned herself into a river – depositing a book of all that she has carried within her.
The result is tumultuous prose – substantial stories capable of anchoring at your heart, a torrent-like flow which perceptibly slows down at points, and a flood of words that seem too busy to grasp in totality.
‘There Are Rivers in the Sky’, Elif Shafak, Viking, 2024.
There Are Rivers in the Sky charts a water droplet’s journey, beginning with a raindrop stuck to the hair of the Assyrian tyrant Ashurbanipal, who ruled in the 600th century BC. The droplet evaporates – as does his civilisation – to return to Victorian England as a snowflake that makes its way to the mouth of Arthur, modelled closely on Assyriologist George W. Smyth. The novel follows Arthur as he leaves the Thames for the Tigris, lavishing attention to his inner world and the unique scholarly temper that leads him from the London slums to the halls of the British Museum where he translates The Epic of Gilgamesh. So far so good. But we are also parallely introduced to two more lines of story – one, a Yazidi girl Narin who prepares to leave the 12,000-year-old city of Hasankeyf in Turkey to visit the Tigris river in Iraq 2014, and two, a hydrologist Zaleekhah in 2018 London who takes up a home on a houseboat on the Thames when life does her dirty. Arthur, Narin and Zaleekhah’s stories progress like three streams but we read with the implicit knowledge that they will become one soon.
Water affects all of them and the reasons are not really fictitious. When you read of Narin and her healer grandmother talking of leaving a treasured hometown for Iraq’s Lalish, you remember how the story of the Turkish administration planning to douse Hasankeyf to build a dam had made global news in 2019. Arthur’s brother dies of cholera after he gives his family a ‘gift’ of two fresh jugs of water collected from a tap. Zaleekhah’s parents died in a flash flood. She is now researching the memory of water – the central theme of the book. If at any point the reader is at risk of forgetting that the ecological and historical significance of water is what drives the book, Shafak is ready with a dialogue, a meditative line or the mention of a water-related tragedy.
That wayward and undying water droplet in Ashurbanipal’s hair returns from time to time in the nearly 500-page book, acting as further reminder of why we ought to take water seriously. Thanks to the sheer number of water-led experiences its characters are made to have, the novel is almost an encyclopedia of everything water can cause to humans and animals. Shafak deploys no cunning in executing this – making the role of water brazen throughout the book. Water is both the protagonist and the repository of all mystery in Shafak’s novel – the source of misery, the bringer of joy, easy to ignore, and as Robert Burns said of the Thames once, ‘liquid history.’
Also read: How the Banks of the Ganga Bore Witness to a Summer of Death and Despair
This is Shafak’s 21st book and even though her style of writing leaves some unimpressed, that it resonates with many others is evident from the way her books climb to bestseller lists as soon as they come out. Her style is undoubtedly busy, unconventional word choices fall like fat droplets. The effect is pleasant and slows reading down at a time of fast-paced consumption.
You are, however, left battling a fundamental question of why three disparate people were chosen in disparate settings to tell this particular story. The answer is perhaps beyond the novel and in the author herself. As a person who has grown up all over the world but who considers Istanbul and London her two homes, it is no surprise that Shafak chooses protagonists who travel from the West to the East (Arthur), from the East to territory ravaged by the West (Narin), and from the East to the West (Zaleekhah’s family). Shafak is poised to straddle the eastness, the westness and the hodgepodge of mixed identities that she accords her characters with. These stories are her stories. The politics of one group towering over another is the politics of her lived life.
When Arthur speaks of new words bringing up sights, sounds and tastes in his head, you remember a TED Talk years ago where Shafak spoke of a young reader asking her if she could taste words. When Narin’s grandmother speaks of healing ailments of the head with remedies passed down to her through her foremothers, you think of another TED Talk where Shafak mentions her own grandmother who also healed skin diseases with unconventional methods.
And so it is that to write a novel on water, Shafak turned her own life into the river that carried all that went into its pages. This novel cares little about structural purity, progressing with a self-sustaining cadence not unlike that of rivers.
