Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky. Penguin pb, 2025; first published 2024; 483 pp.

I’m wary of novels with multiple story strands involving disparate characters and set in different periods. Turkish-British author Elif Shafak just about pulls off this structural feat in her new novel There Are Rivers in the Sky. But I still have a residual feeling that it’s the literary equivalent of those showcase buildings whose architects enjoy putting the entrails of a structure that are usually hidden out of sight, like ventilation pipes, on the outside, like at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. It just looks too mannered. Does it draw more attention to the cleverness of the architect (or author) than the beauty of the building (or novel)?

One of the ways ES keeps the different parts from detracting from the whole effect is that they are all connected and cohere thematically, symbolically and in terms of geopolitical and cultural links. Water and rivers function as a central uniting motif. She says in an appended note to the reader that her maternal grandmother, who raised her until she was 10, ‘believed that water was the fundamental principle of life’. Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq, parts of Turkey, Iran, Syria and Kuwait) is named after its position between the two rivers that flank it: the Tigris and the Euphrates. Stories of this zone, ‘once the cradle of civilisation’ cement the three storylines in the novel.

The first centres on Arthur Smyth from roughly the 1850s to the 1870s. He was born in abject poverty in the slums of Victorian London, and was a childhood prodigy with a phenomenal memory and capacity for languages. He developed into the person who teaches himself to decode the cuneiform tablets taken from the ancient library of King Ashurbanipal in Nineveh (present day Mosul in Iraq) – and in particular the earliest epic poem known to humanity: ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’ – which prefigures many of the motifs and stories found in the (much later) Old Testament. He’s loosely based on the real-life working-class genius George Smith, the autodidact Assyriologist who dedicated his life to finding the poem’s lost tablets and decoding them.

There’s a Dickensian tone to much of this thread of the novel. Arthur’s mother gives birth to him in the stinking, sewage-polluted mud on the banks of the Thames where she scratches a living scavenging for trinkets that can be sold. His father is a drunken, boorish wastrel. Dickens himself makes an appearance when Arthur is working at the printing press where the famous author was about to transfer his business. The filth and pollution of London’s rivers and drinking water is where that river-water theme becomes prominent: cholera is endemic in the population, and one of Arthur’s family dies of it. Dr John Snow, another real-life character, is described here as discovering the source of the disease: it was not, as was thought, an air-borne ‘miasma’ vector, but in the polluted drinking water fountains used by Londoners. Bazalgette’s sewage systems were later to improve this situation, in response to the Great Stink of 1858. Water can bring death as well as life, if not treated well by humans.

This is turning into something of a lecture. And that was one of my ongoing problems with this novel: there were many times when I thought I was being dosed with the author’s obviously meticulous and wide-ranging research. That note to the reader I mentioned at the start lists the large number of scholarly texts she used as source material.

And now I’ve lost my thread. Right, the second storyline. This tells of the fate in 2014 and the years that follow of Narin, a 12-year-old Yazidi girl. The Yazidi are a group of people of mostly Kurdish descent, whose religion is based on an ancient monotheistic system also involving good and bad angels. As a consequence they were (and still are) reviled and persecuted from the start by many Muslims and Christians as devil-worshippers. Genocides of the Yazidi are graphically depicted in Narin’s storyline, and elsewhere in the novel in other periods.

Narin’s story is another of those fluvial links: she lives by the banks of the Tigris with her grandmother, and it’s there that her community is attacked, killed and the girls enslaved by fanatical Isis terrorists – with the implicit collusion of the local authorities and Muslim communities.

The third and final thread tells Zaleekah’s story in 2018. She’s (appropriately enough) a hydrologist of Iraqi (ie Mesopotamian) heritage, and her river, like Arthur’s, is the Thames, where she lives on a houseboat. There’s an unconvincing plot involving her estrangement from her husband, her bizarrely wealthy uncle and aunt and their relationship with her, and her love affair with her landlady. Her life blends with Narin’s towards the end – but only after many more academic lectures on Assyrian mythology (lamassus feature a lot – those splendid sphinx-like statues of winged bulls or lions with human heads), and on the properties of water.

There’s one particular drop of water that appears in the prologue, in which the cultured King Ashurbanipal in Nineveh shows his brutal side. It then evaporates and falls again on Arthur by the Thames, Narin by the Tigris, and, if I remember rightly, on Zaleekah at various times. It’s a much too laboured device that became, for me, intrusive, even a bit cartoonish. Not the effect ES was after in what is, by and large, a powerful and moving indictment of religious and ethnic intolerance, and a nuanced exploration of cultural appropriation (all those Assyrian artefacts in museums and, worse, in the stately homes of wealthy ‘collectors’).

A strangely uneven novel, then. Very good in parts, not so good when it descends into lecture mode. Though I did learn a great deal about Yazidi and Assyrian theogony.