As water scarcity grows, sea levels rise around the world and scandals over the illegal dumping of sewage into our rivers and seas continue, a novel about the politics and preciousness of water is timely. There Are Rivers in the Sky begins with an appealing magical realist proposition: it will follow the lifespan of a raindrop, as it is consumed, subsumed and transformed across continents and centuries. So far, so Elif Shafak: the central figure of her previous novel, The Island of Missing Trees, was a talking fig tree that held forth on recent Cypriot history.
Here, we begin in ancient Mesopotamia. The droplet falls into the hair of despot Ashurbanipal. An “erudite king”, presiding over an extraordinary library which includes the Epic of Gilgamesh, Ashurbanipal is nervously cognisant of the radical potential of storytelling. Fast forward, rather jerkily, to mucky mid-Victorian London. The raindrop has become a snowflake. We meet it settling on the tongue of urchin Arthur Smyth, as his mother – a destitute mudlark – gives birth to him on the banks of the Thames.
The initial raindrop conceit disappears a little as we are introduced to another key character on the edge of a different river. It’s 2014, and Narin is a nine-year-old Yazidi girl being baptised beside the Tigris, accompanied by her weatherbeaten grandmother. This elder is a renowned healer who is keen to take her granddaughter to Lalish, a place of significance for the historically marginalised Yazidi people, situated in war-ravaged Iraq.
Our final protagonist is Zaleekhah Clarke, a hydrologist fascinated by the notion that water might have memory. It’s 2018 and she’s moving on to a houseboat on the Chelsea Embankment, much to the befuddlement of her adopted father Uncle Malek. He’s acted as Zaleekhah’s guardian since her childhood, when her parents were killed in an accident. The dramatic nature of this incident remains tantalisingly undisclosed for several chapters.
Shafak’s homiletic narrator tells us that water can initiate the “melding of markers”. Soon enough, our principal curiosity is about how these distinctly demarcated narrative sections might be brought together. As is Shafak’s stock in trade, unlikely characters are united through vibrant recurring motifs, fabulist coincidences and rigorously highlighted thematic parallels. The lamassu – a mythic hybrid creature – is a symbol that delights both Ashurbanipal and Nen, a charismatic tattooist who meets melancholic Zaleekhah and makes her feel less of an “outsider … an accidental guest who walked in through the wrong door at the wrong time”. The motif of parental abandonment or neglect is ever-present in all three timelines. And Arthur Smyth’s rags-to-riches trajectory, based on the life of Victorian assyriologist George Smyth, includes expeditions to Asia that lead him to Narin’s ancestors.
There is, perhaps, pleasure to be had in Shafak’s corralling of divergent subject matter around ideas of the pull of the past and the endurance of water. However, reading this novel is hard going. Much of this difficulty is to do with an overall bagginess – both at the level of the sentence and in terms of overall structure. It’s possible to see Shafak’s maximalist descriptive style as generous, offering us a “coruscating kaleidoscope of colours and patterns”. There are, here and there, beautifully delicate figurative gestures: waves are “pleats”; a worried facial expression “curdles” to panic. But there’s a lot of exposition, too, obstructing a lasting connection between the reader and the varied worlds and times we are invited into.
Superfluity is also prominent in sections where research – about cuneiform, epidemiology or the sociogeography of London – is on show. Dialogue, too, isn’t always successful. Nen is especially guilty of off-putting, hollow and unconvincing loftiness. At an important turning point in her relationship with Zaleekhah, Nen says, “I guess what water is to you, history is to me: an enigma too vast to comprehend, something more important than my own little life, and yet, at some level, also deeply personal. Does that make sense?”
There’s a vein of sentimentality running through characters’ speech: “Words,” one of Arthur’s kindly benefactors announces, “are like birds … when you publish books, you are setting caged birds free … you never know whom those words will reach, whose hearts will succumb to their sweet song.”
And the endless analogies concerning water lose their charm as Arthur’s Dickens-meets-Rider Haggard saga to the Near East rolls on, and as Narin and her grandmother embark on a perilous pilgrimage: “some people are restless like rivers”; “women are expected to be like rivers – readjusting, reshaping”; “questions … set off a ripple of other questions, as a leaping carp leaves a trail of watery wreath in its wake”; a kiss is “two drops of water finding their way to each other”.
One anxiety with a multi-perspective novel like this is that one storyline might overshadow others. Here, Zaleekhah’s sections don’t pack an emotional punch and the romantic arc is unsatisfyingly predictable. The resolution of her story – an intersection with Narin’s plot – veers towards ludicrousness. Arthur’s chapters, with their concerns about the restitution of plundered artwork and the sacrifices a person might make when driven by academic obsession, are more involving. But it’s the spotlight on Yazidi culture, and the brutal persecution of this community, that is the novel’s most unequivocal achievement.
About three-quarters of the way through there is a heart-rending portrait of Yazidi families fleeing the guns of Islamic State militants: “an endless stream of human beings – raddled bodies push[ing] against gravity. Mothers clutch their babies; pregnant women try to protect the precious life within. Children, dazed and disoriented, trudge silently, too scared to cry. An elderly woman begs her family to leave her behind to die. All […] carrying their limbs like hollow trees … no shade to be found … the heat rising from the ground twists and writhes to form a ghostly calligraphy.” It’s a horrifically recognisable image of ethnic cleansing that cannot fail to anger, disturb and move us. Unfortunately, fulsomeness elsewhere means this plangent note is woefully drowned out.
• There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak is published by Viking (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
