There Are Rivers In The Sky by Elif Shafak review - 'strangely hollow'

The three narrative strands in this novel feel shoehorned in and cobbled together, writes Stuart Kelly

It feels almost heretical, but I should confess that I have never enjoyed Elif Shafak’s novels as much as I feel I am supposed to. It is difficult to disagree that the Armenian genocide in the Orange longlisted The Bastard of Istanbul or misogynistic violence in the Booker shortlisted 10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World are Bad Things. But however upsetting the content, there is a kind of righteous swaddling: yes, there is awfulness, but at least you have the right opinion about it. Your disapproval, even outrage, is greatly appreciated. Conversely, Shafak is evangelical about literature in general. She uses her own widespread quote on her social media: “When you read a novel something magical happens… when you read, you taste freedom and once you taste freedom you never want to go back. Books change us, books save us.” A fine liberal sentiment, until you think about it. Indeed, this new novel ironically undercuts the idea in its opening.

The prelude features King Ashurbanipal of Nineveh, famed for his library, reminiscing over reading the Gilgamesh epic before having his former tutor burned alive. The former confidante has engaged in espionage for the king’s enemy, but his treason is elided with possession of a “blasphemous” version of the Gilgamesh text, with an appended dedication to the goddess Nisaba. Nisaba was an Assyrian goddess associated with writing (and wheat and accountancy, since written language probably began with tallying and stock recording, unpoetic though that may be); so she stands as a cipher for divine and marginalised female creativity. But Ashurbanipal is just an overture.

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The bulk of the narrative involves three connected individuals. Arthur Smyth is a Victorian Assyriologist, very loosely based on the real George Smith, who was not born in a sewer on the Thames to his mudlarking mother. In the present day we have Zaleekhah, an orphaned hydrologist who has just divorced, lives on a canal-boat and whose immigrant uncle is a peer interested in Babylonian remains. By the Tigris rather than the Thames, the third part of the triptych is Narin. With her grandmother, both Yazidis, they are threatened by a dam project that forces them away from ancestral lands and the rise of Islamic State. Narin’s grandmother wants her to be baptised in the sacred spring at Lalish, the holiest site of Yazidism.

Elif Shafak PIC: Leonardo Cendamo/Getty ImagesElif Shafak PIC: Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images
Elif Shafak PIC: Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images

The problem is that these narratives are shoehorned in and cobbled together. The primary conceit is a raindrop which falls on Ashurbanipal, and which recycles variously as a snowflake on the infant Arthur, a quenching sip during forced migration, a teardrop. Shafak did something similar with the vigilant fig tree in The Island of Missing Trees, and here again it is contrived. Comparing the trinity of characters to the two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom in a water molecule is both baroque and forced. There are other raggedy stitches, such as lamassu sculptures, or lapis lazuli; but there are also tenuous genealogical and narrative connections. One instance involves illegal organ acquisition, which reads as if Shafak felt there really ought to be some plot amid all the parallels and echoes and mirrors.

All three narratives might have been worth a whole book, and there are already excellent works on each of the issues. Irving Finkel makes the Gilgamesh story even more intriguing, Gerard Russell’s fascinating Heirs To Forgotten Kingdoms deals with Yazidis as well as other monotheistic, Near East religions, and the philosopher John Gray has some insightful and troubling essays about water conflict.

A lot of the writing is expository, as characters rehearse potentially interesting debates – such as, as regards Zaleekhah’s work on “the memory of water”, the exchange “‘It’s poetic nonsense – not science’ ‘Maybe they’re not worlds apart – science and poetry, I mean.’” CP Snow could not have put it better. It can be simply gushing: “Her great-great-grandmother Leila sounds like an amazing woman. What a pity she will never get to meet her”. If Zaleekhah is berated for pseudo-science, Narin’s grandmother might be charged with phony profundity: “Well, this world is a classroom and we are all its students… hatred is a poison served in three cups… it means it’s not the harmer who bears the scars, but the one who has been harmed”. Some of the dialogue is just needful prompts for opinion pieces: “You seem to know a lot about ancient civilizations” or “For me, the epic is primarily about the both the fragility and resilience of being human”.

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This might be excusable, but the novel also has a kind of inhuman polarising. The Isis commanders may be monsters, but worse than that they are hypocritical monsters, and the character we are following is miraculously spared their monstrosity. Other characters are not immoral, just misguided. The characters have characteristics rather than personalities: one is bisexual, one has a photographic memory, one is going deaf. Are you able to guess which is which? Does it matter even if you guess correctly?

However interesting the material, however urgent the matter, the formulaic manner of this book means it feels strangely hollow, stridently ineffectual. Maybe her 13th novel will surprise me.

There Are Rivers In The Sky, by Elif Shafak, Viking, £18.99. Elif Shafak is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 10 August

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