There Are Rivers in the Sky

Rivers are fluid bridges – channels of communication between separate worlds. They link one bank to the other, the past to the future, the spring to the delta, earthlings to celestial beings, the visible to the invisible, and ultimately, the living to the dead.

Water, and rivers in particular, dictate more of our lives than most people realize. Cities, especially those founded before the proliferation of the railroad, need water and are very often situated along rivers. Our highways and railways often parallel rivers, taking advantage of prehistoric pathways the water has carved over millennia. I've spent much of my life in and around rivers – in them, I find orientation in a disorienting world. I'm a river person, and as such, I'm aware that many of our rivers are under various threats. Pollution, impoundment (damming), and rising water temperatures threaten both the quantity and the usability of our planet's freshwater, as well as every organism that relies on that water for survival. Like us.

I don't particularly like thinking about these things.

There Are Rivers in the Sky gave me no choice. Elif Shafak's novel is so finely crafted that we are confronted with these unpleasant truths, but she makes us want to sit with them. Both elegant and compelling, There Are Rivers combines multiple storylines told over a couple thousand years, the common thread between them being a single drop of water. Maybe this sounds a bit twee (it did to me, at first) but Shafak masterfully weaves the stories with a sleight of hand. Plot developments feel organic, natural, never forced by the author's storyboarding. Much of the story also revolves around the Epic of Gilgamesh, a Mesopotamian epic poem whose origins around 2100 BC likely date it as the oldest written poem in the world. This has the effect of somehow grounding the novel, like giving it an ancient air of authority.

I found There Are Rivers in the Sky to be a nearly perfect novel. The prose is artistic but not overly florid. The plot moves but doesn't lean on cliffhangers or other devices to artificially hook the reader. The sentences, the story, and the characters do the work, and do it well.

A poem is a swallow in flight. You watch it soar through the infinite sky, you can even feel the wind passing over its wings, but you can never catch it, let alone keep it in a cage. Poems belong to no one.

Like poems, rivers may be experienced, they may be temporarily impounded, they may be fought over, but we can never catch them, and they belong to no one. Elif Shafak reminds us we'd do well to remember this.

4.5/5 stars