"There are Rivers in the Sky" by Elif Shafak

In “There are Rivers in the Sky” you will find three narrative strands plaited together, and even though they span many years — from the 1850s to the 2010s — the themes they treat at length are all 21st Century concerns. Elif Shafak’s agenda clearly focuses on current issues, current challenges that sometimes feel intractable. On the whole it is a grand attempt, but I finished it unmoved, disappointed by its cobbled-together feel, and at a distance from the final protagonist. 

We meet Arthur Smyth at the moment of his birth in a squalid Thames-side slum in 1840 London. Arthur can remember the moment of his birth and each and every moment of his life since. His abilities are acute, and wasted on the lessons of small-minded teachers in a charity school for boys. In a pivotal moment of his life he witnesses a massive Assyrian sculpture — a lamassu, a hybrid god with the head of a human, the body of a bull, and the wings of a bird. His confined horizons suddenly disappear, as he gazes in wonder. Jumping forward to 2014, we encounter Narin, a young Yazidi girl in southeastern Turkey who is slowly going deaf. Her link to the world is her beloved grandmother, whose lessons and wisdom are indeed rich and worthy. The third of our protagonists is hydrologist Dr. Zaleekhah Greene, working in London for a non-profit in 2018. Zaleekhah is finding it hard to find her path, and battles with her adoptive father over her impending divorce.

 

 Shafak sets up her challenge of yoking these three characters into serving her themes. Her plotting is clever and her concerns comprehensive, but make no mistake: the author’s focus is on current 21st Century themes: intractable Mideast conflict, oppression, genocide, global climate change, the plight of immigrants, both in the physical migration and in the cultural assimilation that must follow. She engages us with the history of a single drop of water which falls on ancient Assyrian King Ashurbanipal’s head, and winds up as part of the River Thames in the 19th Century, obviously having traveled any number of other places. The 21st Century scientist, worried about pollution and dwindling fresh water, also wrestles her own clinical depression and a family which she thinks is unsupportive (she’s wrong). 

 

The yoking-together felt forced at times, in spite of Shafak’s unstinting effort to fit them together. Zaleekhah’s character in particular I found unsuccessful, either as a human with feelings, or as an exemplar of modern women, trying to make her way in the world. She’s quite insular for most of the book, in terms of interacting with other characters, including (and especially) her family. 

 

The author is inventive, for sure. See “10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in This Strange World” if you have any doubts. There are Rivers in the Sky doesn’t necessarily tend to the ponderous, but in all the multifarious stories contained within it, I found the final, principal protagonist, Zaleekhah, a wanting, unsympathetic character. As I look back on it, the conception is brilliant, but the execution doesn’t quite measure up.