「经济学人」There Are Rivers in the Sky

Elif Shafak, a novelist, returns with an ambitious book about water and memory

There Are Rivers in the Sky. By Elif Shafak. Knopf; 464 pages; $30. Viking; £18.99

In a popular TED talk in 2010, Elif Shafak, a British-Turkish bestselling novelist living in exile in London, touted the boundary-flouting, heart-expanding powers of fiction, comparing it to “flowing water”. Now water, as both a substance and metaphor, courses through “There Are Rivers in the Sky”.

In this ambitious, centuries-spanning novel, Ms Shafak uses various incarnations of water—from the “mercurial and unforgiving” Tigris in ancient Mesopotamia to the “acrid and vile” Thames in Victorian London to the “drying, dying force” of climate change in the 21st century—to consider the forces and stories that connect people across continents and time. Just as raindrops and tears evaporate up to the skies and return “to this troubled earth again…and again”, so too are the pains of past generations visited upon their descendants. “Water remembers,” Ms Shafak writes. “It’s humans who forget.”

The novel opens on a rainy day in the seventh century BC, in the doomed kingdom of Ashurbanipal, an Assyrian ruler known for his library and cruelty. It then jumps to the banks of the murky Thames in 1840, where a pregnant tosher (sewer scavenger) gives birth to a brilliant son named Arthur, who later becomes fascinated by the mysteries of Mesopotamia and what remains of Ashurbanipal’s tablets.

Bringing the story into the modern day is Narin, a Yazidi girl who lives by the Tigris in Turkey with her grandmother, a healer who uses water to wash away disease and purify the mind. And there is Zaleekhah, a lonely hydrologist who abandons her failing marriage to live in a houseboat on the Thames in 2018. She ponders suicide by drowning, seeing it as “less a departure than a homecoming, a return to water”.

Ms Shafak, who has not returned to Turkey for years because of the repressiveness of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s regime, revisits some of her usual themes. These include the aches of exile, the brutality of zealotry and the way the past so often haunts the present.

She could have been more sparing with her symbolism. All this water—metaphorical and otherwise—gets a bit sloshy. Moving back and forth between storylines can also be disorienting, and Ms Shafak’s penchant for using grand language for grand ideas can feel humourless and overwrought. Yet there is something bracing about the sweep of this book, which encompasses the fall of empires, the massacres of peoples, the fight over history and even the hopeful dawning of love.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Going with the flow”(Aug 8th 2024)

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