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Published on: 10/21/24 5:18 AM

Book review: There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

One drop of water to bind them all

 One single drop of water. It falls from the sky onto Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian  king. From then on, it alters its structure but not its DNA,  and enters the system of the other main characters: King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums, that self-taught genius who grows up by the Thames; Narin, the young gifted Yazidi girl in a settlement by the Tigris; Zaleekhah Clarke, the scientist studying the nature of water in London, living in a house boat on the Thames. Shafak binds these four disparate characters in a bond that is tensile, giving us what might be her best story yet.

We follow the  time-honoured tradition here: the story-teller spins us a fascinating yarn that melds the historical with the contemporary, and the listener/reader absorbs it in its entirety, coming out of the spell it has cast only after we have turned the last page.

It is `olden times` and we watch Ashurbanipal in a scholarly setting, his fabled library where the jewel in the crown is the Epic of Gilgamesh;  we recoil in horror when we witness his sanction to an act of extreme cruelty, burning alive  his old tutor.

We then go the slushy banks of the murky Thames; it is 1840 and a baby boy has just been born to a tosher, a riverbank  scavenger. Living in extremely penurious circumstances, young Arthur Smyth makes the best use of his gift, a prodigious memory, and slowly teaches himself how to decipher cuneiform, climbing out of the gutter. Arthur eventually starts to work at the British Museum, and makes it his life`s quest to find the missing eleventh tablet from the Gilgamesh epic.

Then we make the jump to 2014 and to Zerav in Turkey, where the construction of a new dam puts the little settlement by the Tigris in danger of flooding, the villagers in danger of displacement. Narin is just nine years old but slowly going deaf, though her grandmother tells her that her gifts will intensify as she grows. The child has no idea what these gifts may be but she knows she comes from a family of women seers, including her ancestor Leila, who incidentally, Arthur Smyth falls in love with some 200 years ago, when he goes to Nineveh to excavate the missing Gilgamesh tablet inscribed on a lapis lazuli surface. We watch with a defined sense of unease as the grandmother and granddaughter set forth to Iraq, even as the Daesh/ISIS  is slowly tightening its incredibly cruel hold over the region and picking out Yazidis,  the `devil-worshippers,` for special treatment.

When it all comes together

Then we hurtle forwards to 2018 and watch hydrologist Zaleekhah Clarke battle a breaking marriage, depression, a feeling of drifting through life in a futile manner. She meets Nen the owner of the houseboat on the Thames that she is currently renting, Nen is very taken with yes, the Epic of Gilgamesh and introduces Zaleekhah to its healing powers.

And by the end of the story, it all comes together conclusively, not in a joyous manner but in a way that does promise some hope and redemption to some of the characters, if not all.

The author conveys much through the story-binding device of water: how the once green lands of Nineveh in Mesopatamia is first flooded, then turns into barren desert. How water filled with effluents, the Thames of the mid-19th century in this case, spreads cholera faster than the blink of an eye. How water is poisoned by people out to destroy your tribe. How the Yazidis, victims of genocide and sheltering on Mount Sinjar, crave a drop of water to pour down the parched throats of their children. And just outside but not too far away from the theme of water, how the British looted other countries` treasures with impunity, the greater implications of this looting being the idea of European supremacy needing an Orient imbued with deprivation and despair.

If her style is typically florid, it holds this intensely, immensely researched story of what happens by the banks of three mighty rivers, the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Thames cohesively together. Because Elif Shafak wishes us to understand that “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”

There are Rivers in the Sky By Elif Shafak. Penguin Books. 484 pages. 18.99 Pounds.

This ran in the Literary Review of 20 October 2024.

https://www.thehindu.com/books/book-review-there-are-rivers-in-the-sky-author-elif-shafak-water-ties-london-turkey-ancient-mesopotamia/article68752010.ece

 

 

AshurbanipalElif ShafakEpic of GilgameshLondonPenguin Booksscavengers by the ThamesThere are Rivers in the SkyTurkeywater conservationYazidis

Sheila Kumar • October 21, 2024


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