There Are Rivers in the Sky 
Elif Shafak, Viking, £18.99

RAINDROPS as metaphor for historical memory is a clever narrative device that Shafak exploits to the full, taking us from ancient Mesopotamia, via the British Museum in Victorian Britain to modern-day Turkey, where a young Yazidi girl is reminded by her grandmother of the ancient history of their country in which the Yazidis are still a persecuted minority. 

Melding fiction with real historical events and figures, Shafak creates a fascinating story that intertwines individual lives with historical events, involving class, race and colonialism. 

The novel begins in ancient Mesopotamia, when a raindrop falls on the head of despotic ruler Ashurbanipal. He owns an extraordinary library of clay tablets which includes the Epic poem of Gilgamesh. We fast forward to mid-Victorian London, where the raindrop becomes a snowflake, settling on Arthur Smyth — also based on a real historical figure — as he is born in midwinter to a destitute mother on the banks of the Thames. The Victorian Assyriologist George Smith was indeed a self-taught working-class boy who became an expert in the interpretation of ancient cuneiform writing, but Shafak’s retelling of his life turns it into a fairy-tale, undermining its validity as a perceptive commentary on class. 

Another key character is Narin, a nine-year-old Yazidi girl living in present-day Turkey on the banks of the Tigris. Arthur Smyth’s expeditions to Asia during the mid-19th century had led him to Narin’s ancestors. 

Shefak’s description of the Yazidi families fleeing Islamic State fanatics is very moving and the images are representative of all those fleeing the war and ethnic cleansing that so characterises our present day world. The highlighting of Yazidi culture, and the ongoing persecution of the Yazidi people, is one of the novel’s achievements.

The final protagonist is Zaleekhah Clarke, a hydrologist intrigued by the notion that water might have memory. It’s not clear if the author herself believes in the debunked idea that water retains the memory of substances, however much diluted, that have been dissolved in it. It might work as a clever literary device but giving it a pseudo-scientific validity undermines the real historical truths dealt with in the novel.

I was certainly curious to see how the author would manage to weave together the different historical threads and diverse characters into a cohesive structure. She does so by using recurring motifs, coincidences and thematic parallels, even if our imaginations are sometimes stretched to breaking point. 

There are Rivers in the Sky is an ambitious novel that takes up a whole number of challenging subject matters and it certainly delivers rewards. The pull of the past and the way history informs our present is forcefully underlined, not least by the recurring water and river metaphor. However, reading it can be hard going. 

The dialogue is often ponderous and stilted, even though Shafak’s language can sometimes be very beautiful and evocative; at other times, though, it becomes over-literary and artificial. And this reader felt they were being given a history lesson, rather than being drawn in naturally by the characters and their trajectories.