There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

Maybe I’m wrong about this one. I mean, Ruth Ozeki calls it an odyssey, an epic, a lament, a clarion call and a masterpiece, all in one short blurb. Mary Beard calls it a “brilliant, unforgettable novel”, while Nadifa Mohamed calls it “Literature on a grand scale.” Critics, novelists and Goodreads reviewers all seem to be competing over how much praise they can heap on There Are Rivers in the Sky, the new novel by Elif Shafak published in August.

So why did it leave me cold? After all, I’ve read and enjoyed many of Shafak’s previous novels. I listed 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World as one of my best books of 2019. And I love the concept of a historical epic with the characters all linked across space and time by their interaction with a single drop of water.

There are also some beautiful and poignant moments throughout the book, especially in the sections involving Narin, a young Yazidi girl living a peaceful life with her grandmother by the banks of the Tigris until they encounter the brutality of ISIS. Shafak’s writing is never bad, and I certainly didn’t hate this book. But I didn’t agree with any of the quotes and reviews. It was admirable in many ways but ultimately disappointing for me.

I think there are several reasons for this: one structural, one conceptual, and one to do with character.

1. Disconnected Narratives

The first is that the strands are too disparate. We start with King Ashurbanipal in ancient Nineveh, and then we skip forward to Arthur, a baby being born in the Victorian slums of 1840s London, and then we spend some time with Narin in 2014 before skipping ahead to Zaleekah, a depressed academic living on a London houseboat in 2018. The king is quickly abandoned, and most of the novel involves switching between the other three narratives.

All the characters are connected by that drop of water as it completes its long cycle of falling as rain, flowing out to sea, etc. It’s a beautiful image showing the unseen connections across time and space, but it’s quite tenuous as a way of linking narratives. They’re also brought together in the denouement, but it didn’t feel particularly satisfying to me and wasn’t enough to justify almost 500 pages of entirely separate stories.

2. Undercooked Characters

The second problem is in the characters themselves. Arthur gets the most airtime of the three, and although on the surface it was a compelling story of rising from poverty to become an expert on Mesopotamian artefacts and to uncover the mysteries of the Epic of Gilgamesh, I struggled to maintain much interest. It felt more like a biography of a historical figure than a story about a human being.

That was very surprising to me because one of the strengths of Shafak’s writing in the past has been her ability to create characters who feel utterly real and compelling. That wasn’t the case for me with Arthur Smyth. Maybe it’s because we skim through his whole life at high speed, never lingering long enough on interesting details. For example, Arthur has a perfect memory—he never forgets anything, and he can recall not just details and conversations from years ago but even the snowdrop that fell on him as he was born in the mud and filth on the banks of the Thames. This could have been explored in very interesting ways, as Jorge Luis Borges did in his short story “Funes the Memorious”, in which the teeming particulars that crowded a man with a perfect memory made it impossible for him to generalise. But in There Are Rivers in the Sky, it mostly just functioned to make Arthur more of a genius and less of a believable character.

Zaleekah was potentially interesting because she was so clearly lost and as a reader you want to know why, but she spent most of the novel in denial about the problems besetting her, and we spent so little time with her that her epiphany, when it came, felt underwhelming.

As for Narin, it was fascinating to get a glimpse of Yazidi culture, which I encountered a little in my travels in Armenia and Georgia and was happy to see rendered so well in fiction. Hers is the most interesting narrative, which is strange since she’s just an innocent nine-year-old kid. The other two characters should have offered more complexity, but the opportunities were missed.

3. Research Overwhelm

The third problem is, I think, related to the other two. There was clearly an enormous amount of research involved in creating There Are Rivers in the Sky, and it shows. What I mean is that in trying to convey the wealth of research she uncovered, I think Shafak undercooked the most important things in a novel: character and plot. At times, she just has the characters convey chunks of research to us in their conversations, and at others, they offer opinions on things like the theft of artefacts for European museum collections—opinions I generally agreed with but didn’t need to have spelled out for me like that.

Ultimately, I think perhaps the concept of the novel contained its flaws for me (and perhaps also what other people loved about it). Water is perhaps the antithesis of a fictional character: it flows and shapes the world around it but has no desires, no goals, no hopes and fears. The attempts to make raindrops and rivers into characters fell flat for me, and the water-based structure felt too amorphous, too difficult to grasp. Yet these are perhaps the very qualities that all those other readers loved.

So take my thoughts on There are Rivers in the Sky with a large pinch of salt, check out other reviews, and by all means give this one a try. I’ve focused more on the negatives here because I was trying to understand why my reaction differed so wildly from almost everyone else’s, but the novel does have plenty of good features too. You can do a lot worse than reading it, but you can also do a lot better—pretty much anything from Shafak’s back catalogue is better than this. I’d recommend Honour, The Island of Missing Trees, and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World in particular.

The post There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

On his blog A Writer’s Life, British novelist Andrew Blackman shares book reviews, insights into the writing process and the latest literary news, as well as listing short story contests with a total of more than $250,000 in prize money.

Source: https://andrewblackman.net/2024/09/there-are-rivers-in-the-sky-by-elif-shafak/