Elif Shafak’s novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky, opens with a raindrop falling on Mesopotamia’s King Ashurbanipal as he examines a tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh. He has many copies of the poem, but this one, colored “the blue of restless rivers,” he keeps hidden because it praises a certain god in defiance of royal decree, thus violating his authority. While we never return to Ashurbanipal’s story, the motifs established there haunt the three narrative strands that Shafak braids together to form the novel, each following a different character in a different time.

As the text early notes, “time is circles within circles. It neither dies nor declines but whirls in epicycles.” The three characters’ (Arthur, Narin, and Zaleekhah) paths overlap and parallel each other in unexpected ways, each shaped by the Gilgamesh flood tablet. The novel focuses less on individual plot points than on weaving intricate connections, focalized through the opening scene’s drop of water, which re-forms at key moments. Split between the Thames and the Tigris Rivers, the story is as much about water as it is about the three protagonists. When Arthur is born on the banks of the Thames, the narration notes that “a child of the river he is, and so he will remain all his life.” Just as ancient Mesopotamia emerged between the Tigris and Euphrates, a “storyland between the two rivers,” these three characters, their lives caught in the ripples of that civilization, are similarly altered by a different pair. Each of their stories adds something new to the tapestry of the novel, enabling Shafak to interrogate different preoccupations, but all are bound together by their deep ties to water and Gilgamesh.

The oldest narrative chronologically is that of King Arthur of the Slums and Sewers, a boy born  with a prodigious memory along the banks of the Thames in 1840. In Arthur’s first moments, the raindrop that landed on Ashurbanipal, now a snowflake, drifts into his mouth, “carr[ying] with it the memories of its previous lives…like an invisible fingerprint.” Arthur’s talent leads him to a job decoding ancient Mesopotamian tablets, igniting within him a fascination with the Gilgamesh flood tablet. Set during the mid-nineteenth century explosion of archaeological interest in ancient Mesopotamia, Arthur’s narrative offers insight into both the colonial ideas that shape historical narrative and the ways in which ancient stories can shake the world.

The second thread is that of Narin, a nine-year-old Yazidi girl living by the Tigris River in Turkey in 2014. She faces both slowly going deaf and the construction of a dam that threatens to destroy her village and their ancestral burial site (including the grave of an Englishman with quite an odd name). As Narin is about to be baptized using water brought from the holy Valley of Lalish, unaware that the vial contains a drop that once fell on a Mesopotamian king’s head, construction interrupts the rite, leading her grandmother to take her to Iraq to be baptized in Valley of Lalish itself. Ancestral stories of floods and water accompany their journey as the pair face religious persecution amid the looming threat of ISIS. Seen through the eyes of a child, these events tie the stories of the past to the horrors of the present and highlight the importance of protecting shared histories.

The final story follows Zaleekhah, a newly divorced young woman who has just moved onto a houseboat on the Thames in 2018. A hydrologist who studies the environmental importance of protecting bodies of water, her worldview is haunted by memories of her parents dying in a flash flood and the more recent loss of a colleague who had been ridiculed for his theory of “aquatic memory,” the idea that water is “marked forever by what it once contained.” At her lowest moment, Zaleekhah’s tears include a water droplet now very familiar to the reader. When she meets a tattoo artist who works with the Epic of Gilgamesh, Zaleekhah’s story explores the wider impact that an ancient text can have even in the modern age, comforting readers across time. Even as she grapples with imminent environmental disasters, Zaleekhah’s narrative is fundamentally about the power of stories from the past to heal us in the present.

The text betrays a deep anxiety about water-related calamity. Narin’s village will be flooded by a dam, and she later almost dies of dehydration while under siege by ISIS. Arthur unknowingly provides his brother water that will give him fatal cholera. Zaleekhah lost her parents to a flash flood and studies the impacts of flooding and contaminated water in her work. As the flood tablet, perhaps the oldest surviving story of environmental disaster, looms in the background, the reader is reminded that water, rather than posing a hypothetical future threat caused by climate change, has endangered humans for as long as we can remember. In doing so, the novel justifies constructing itself around the Epic of Gilgamesh, not only the best-known story of the oldest human civilization, but one pressingly relevant to present challenges. When Arthur, who knows all too well the dangers of polluted water, presents the first translation of the flood tablet, he observes, “The story of humanity cannot be written without the story of water…yet we hardly pay sufficient regard to this remarkable compound on which our lives and our futures depend. The findings that I intend to present to you today concern rivers and rainstorms, and the memory of an ancient flood.” Even when the story is first recovered, the connection between the “memory” of a long-passed disaster and our “futures” cannot be ignored.  

Water, however, does not just frame the discussion of climate disaster, but also underpins the novel’s most important work. Yes, There Are Rivers in the Sky is deeply worried about climate disaster, but it is more interested in the construction of history and the ways in which stories influence human life over generations. The text’s emphasis on the long-standing danger of water becomes symptomatic of a larger argument about the cyclicality of history. Reflecting on his archeological endeavors at the end of his life, Arthur observes, “Time is a river that meanders… depositing sediments of stories along its shores in the hope that someday, someone, somewhere will find them.” The connections between characters, their shared locations and images, are not random but natural, each life shaped into similar courses by the currents of time. Water functions not just to connect characters or tie current climate disasters to past events, but also as a complex metaphor for the way in which shared history can be forgotten and regained, erased and excavated. In a book about an ancient story, water serves as a physical manifestation of how even ancient tales have impacts today.

Reading There Are Rivers in the Sky is a spellbinding experience—each chapter reveals unexpected connections. Each moment of the text is so rife with intentionality that it is difficult not to linger and attempt to identify each link. Just as Arthur is drawn to patterns in language, attempting to decipher them “where others see chaos,” so too does Shafak create a narrative so interwoven that one cannot grasp every detail on the first reading. It is a book about how stories and history can shift and be understood in different contexts, and, just so, it demands reexamination. Reaching the final page, I immediately flipped back to the opening chapter, propelled by the cyclical nature of the book to revisit the beginning in light of the rest of the story. Here, the text notes, 

Ashurbanipal loves stories. He believes that, in order to succeed as a leader…all you need is a memorable tale, one that frames you as the hero. Yet, as much as the king treasures stories, he does not trust storytellers. Their imagination, unable to settle in one place, like the Tigris in springtime, changes course in a manner most unpredictable…wild and untamed to the end. 

“Remember,” the text seems to implore, “stories have always had power and authority has always attempted to contain them.” The later characters remember Ashurbanipal as a king dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. He succeeded in creating “a memorable tale, one that frames [him] as the hero,” but the tablet he attempted to hide survived as well. Storytellers are “untamed,” and stories too are able to endure and “change course.” One’s initial encounter with this passage establishes Ashurbanipal as an unjust king attempting to force historical narrative, but rereading reveals a testament to a story thriving despite attempts to bury it.

This focused exploration of time’s cyclicality reveals the necessity of its perpetual shifting between the three protagonists. It is only through alternating characters constantly that one is able to see the complex parallels Shafak draws and the skillful ways in which she reveals connections at certain moments within each protagonist’s arc. It is also this focus that distinguishes There Are Rivers in the Sky from other recent books that likewise shift between timelines. Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land will likely spring to many readers’ minds—it too follows characters across centuries that are connected by a single text. The two novels, however, use the concept quite differently. Doerr is interested in the transmission of stories; one reviewer characterizes how, “the story of how [its central manuscript]…narrowly escapes destruction is the thread that links the different narratives.” Fundamentally hopeful, Doerr’s connections are presented more as miraculous than fated. In comparison, Shafak cares less about how the Epic of Gilgamesh has survived than how it might shed light on our present circumstances. The connections between her characters seem almost inevitable as she sketches a world where the currents of time carry lives along similar channels. In There Are Rivers in the Sky, connections occur due to inherent cyclicality rather than chance, and the implications for the present carry an air of warning more than that of Doerr’s magic trick. Cloud Cuckoo Land  may testify to “the power and possibilities of reading,” but Shafak offers a glimpse into the consequences should stories of the past be lost or ignored.

Remember, my heart. Story-time is different from clock-time. Clock-time, however punctual it may purport to be, is distorted and deceptive. It runs under the illusion that everything is moving steadily forward and the future, therefore, will always be better than the past. Story-time understands the fragility of peace, the fickleness of circumstances, the dangers lurking in the night but also appreciates small acts of kindness.

So warns Narin’s grandmother, and so the many timelines of this novel are justified. “Story-time” does not operate linearly, but rather asks us to simultaneously look backwards and forwards, understanding that our shared memories are still significant today, that, rather than “moving steadily forward,” stories, like a droplet of water, might change forms, eternally coming back into relevance. This work weaves a complex, ever-overlapping testament to the fact that nothing exists today unshaped by the past. It is not an optimistic text—indeed, even in Narin’s grandmother’s description of the strength of stories, she emphasizes “dangers lurking” and “the fragility of peace.” There Are Rivers in the Sky is as aware of attempts to silence certain stories as it is of the ability of stories to heal people. Some stories survive against all expectations, but history and cultures cannot always be recovered once they are lost. As Arthur observes, “We make art to leave a mark for the future, a slight kink in the river of stories, which flows too fast and too wildly for any of us to comprehend.” This text is deeply anxious, but also expresses hope that we might still be able to heed the warnings and avoid the mistakes of times prior. Exploring the ever-shifting nature of stories, this text begs the reader to consider the relevance of the past to today and the danger of allowing the rivers of history to be buried.

I was provided with a review copy of this book by NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I tried something new with this review, experimenting with more of a literary style (looking more at things like the New York Review of Books than my typical work). I really enjoyed writing it, but (for the purposes of a book review blog, which people primarily come to to learn my thoughts about a book, rather than for a detailed analysis of what the book is doing), I’m not sure whether I’ll be sticking with it or not.