There are rivers in the sky, by Elif Shafak

As Shafak says in her final note to the reader, “beyond the borders of time, geography and identity,” water connects us all.

The author has dubbed her latest work a love song to rivers. “Fluid bridges, they “link one bank to the other, the past to the future, the spring to the delta, earthlings to celestial beings, the visible to the invisible…the living to the dead.”

Focusing on the Tigris and the Thames, the book opens with a cameo of the arrogant Assyrian King Asurbanipal. The maker of a great empire at the cost of vast suffering, he considers his extensive library proof that he’s a civilized man.

The character we meet next is Arthur. Born in the Victorian age among the impoverished toshers who seek anything of value in the sludge of the Thames, he grows up to become an explorer obsessed with ancient Nineveh. Along with him, the reader is invited to consider the possibility that civilization is “the name we give to what little we have salvaged” from losses we’d rather forget. The truth is, “Triumphs are erected on the jerry-built scaffolding of brutalities untold.”

As well as Arthur, we meet nine-year-old Narin, a contemporary Yazidi girl whose people have been attacked by ISIS and also ruthlessly uprooted to make way for the Ilisu Dam on the Tigris that floods her homeland, drowning the pistachio trees too.

Opened in 2019, the dam on the Tigris inundated many ancient sites as well as dropping the levels of the great river in what is already one of the driest regions in the world.

In contemporary London, we meet the water scientist Zaleekhah. Depressed by her research findings about the world’s dying rivers, she also carries the grief of having lost both parents at an early age. On top of that, like other children of uprooted parents, she is “born into the memory tribe. If they flourish and prosper, their achievements will be attributed to a whole community” and their failures “chalked up to something bigger and older than themselves, be it family, religion, or ethnicity.”

As the author unrolls the fascinating tales of the three main characters, she shows us their times and places in fascinating detail. With Arthur, we glimpse the early days of the British Museum, and in 1854, pass with him through the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held in the Crystal Palace, recently opened by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. We also learn when the first hippopotamus, a gift from the Ottoman sultan, arrived in England. When Arthur travels to Nineveh, we see Constantinople during the Ottoman era and witness with him the great fire of Pera.

In our own time, with Zaleekhah as she jogs through the Boltons in South Kensington to visit her uncle, we learn that some of “the residents of this exclusive enclave…old-money British families and several of the wealthiest families from the Middle East, Asia and Russia…pay extra taxes to keep their ownership of these often-empty homes secret.” We also find out that in her lab, she and her colleagues have researched the overpopulation of mitten crabs living in the Thames. These creatures have “stomachs and intestines clogged with pollutants.” Their burrow-digging habits are clogging drains and increasing London’s flood risk. The hydrologists have also discovered that the river eels carry high concentrations of coffee and cocaine.

Suffering from a condition that will eventually render her deaf in both ears, Nerin delights in listening to her grandmother’s stories before her hearing fades. Though her people’s beliefs are respectful of the earth and especially its precious water, she is hurt to learn that the other tribes of the area call them devil worshippers. Nerin belongs to a long line of female healers. Calling on strength conferred by her loving father and grandmother, she survives severe ordeals. Through a twist of fate, she meets Zaleekhah, who opens the possibility a new life. Meeting Nerin also gives new hope and purpose to the despairing hydrologist.

One thing that connects Asurbanipal, Arthur, Zaleekhah and Nerin is the world’s most ancient written story poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh. Calling on her uniquely mythical style, Shafak also reveals how the characters are linked together across time and space by a single drop of water, that pervasive and miraculous substance without which there could be no life. Water has memory, Zaleekhah knows, yet as a scientist, to research this possibility is to risk reputation, career and funding. She also knows that water “hardens in adverse circumstances, not unlike the human heart.”

Framed by a drop of water and the world’s first long epic poem, written in cuneiform on clay tablets by ancient Assyrians, this amazing novel reconnects us to our human heritage both dark and light. Shafak reminds us of the profound challenges of our time, warning of the dangers we court by our careless abuse of the precious resource of the water that knows no boundaries of class, ethnicity, or religion. “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”

Through the tale of a water droplet, the book alludes to the big questions: war, violent intolerance, human displacement, widespread pollution, encroaching censorship, and the suppression of women and their knowledge by the dominant yet limiting male certitudes that still control many of our civilizations.

A 21st century woman, Zaleekhah portrays the limitations of the old religious certitudes. For her, God is “someone she could easily be furious with, yet whose existence she does not even believe in.”