A novel embedded in history, enriched by poetry by Marjorie Arons Barron
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog.
There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak is a large book delicately woven by a metaphor: drop of water falls into the river, whose particles are borne to the sky and fall again to the earth as rain, only to repeat itself. The image speaks to continuing cycles of human experience, starting at the Tigris River in 640 B.C.E. with King Ashurbanipal of Nineveh, an ancient Assyrian city now the site of Mosul, Iraq. The king was a tyrant and collector of books and antiquities, whose vast library includes the epic poem Gilgamesh, written on clay tablets and believed to be the first book of literature in the world, c. 2100 B.C.
Gilgamesh was a legendary king of Mesopotamia, a region that included Assyria. (The tale of Gilgamesh predates The Iliad and The Odyssey by well over a century, and the account of one of Gilgamesh’s journeys prefigures the story of Noah and the flood.) The culture and destruction of the Mesopotamian city of Nineveh, c. 7th century B.C., holds fascination for the three major characters of Shafak’s book, published in August, 2024.
The core novel starts in the 1840’s. The setting moves to the toxic pollution of the River Thames in London, where an intellectually gifted teenager named Arthur Smyth (nicknamed “King of the Slums”) supports his abusive family by retrieving saleable scraps from the mud heaps by the river. He himself is saved by his intellect and unique gift of memory by the offer of a job with a printing press. One of the publisher’s clients, Charles Dickens, introduces Arthur to the History of Nineveh. He becomes obsessed with artifacts and stories of Mesopotamia and the book Gilgamesh. Still living in the slums, he is hired by the British Museum to decode clay tablets telling the ancient story. His feat makes him a cultural celebrity whose life’s work becomes archeological excavation along the Tigris River to unearth truths about that ancient civilization in Nineveh.
The story leaps to 2014. The reader is introduced to Narin, a 10-year-old, whose family are Yazidis, related to a Kurdish sect in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Her grandparents are intent on taking her from London back to Iraq to complete her Baptism rituals in ancestral lands by the Tigris River, the whole area now threatened destruction by Isis. Her grandmother inspires her with the story of her great-great-grandmother, Leilah, a seer, who, it turns out, had had ties to Arthur Smyth. And so goes the cycle of life and loss.
Arthur’s passions are echoed in 2018 with Zaleekah, a London hydrologist of Turkish descent whose career is devoted to work on water and climate. Orphaned as a child, she is raised by a wealthy uncle and, as a thirty-year-old, moves to a houseboat on that very same Thames to escape a bad marriage. She, too, is captured by the history of Nineveh. She has ties to Narin that I will not spoil by recounting here.
Shafak weaves the stories of these characters intricately with the destruction of Nineveh, the book of Gilgamesh, with the ever-present and ever-symbolic Tigris and Thames Rivers, and that first, poetically observed, drop of water. (I actually ended up reading my husband’s copy of Gilgamesh, which was an easier read than I anticipated.)
Shafak goes back and forth among the characters, enriching the sagas with little touches, symbols that resonate with their various tales, providing mysteries for the reader to solve. Occasionally, the details threaten to become a little burdensome, but immediately the reader is lured back to the intertwined adventures of Arthur, Zaleekah and Narin. In the end, the cross-centuries telling of There are Rivers in the Sky is as epic as the original Gilgamesh, and is a literary journey worth embarking upon.