Book Review | Gut-wrenching novel on lives, Yazidi legacy

Last Sunday — decades after I finished college — I remembered a lecture that introduced a piece of literary jargon to my English literature class. ‘Pathetic fallacy’. An author’s urge to use natural phenomena to reflect or foreshadow the emotional state of a character, such as the description of a rising storm just before a character’s downfall by hubris.

As I read There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak, I wished there was such a thing as reverse pathetic fallacy. Much of Shafak’s story is grim and I was not only terrified in my anticipation of the cruelties bound to come but sunk in gloomy contemplation of the nastiness that human beings are capable of. So I looked out of the window at the grey, ominous monsoon sky, certain that my almost visceral reaction to the book was induced by the weather, and wished I could read it when the sky is bright blue and scary books may seem less frightening.

But book reviews wait for no one, so I’m here to tell you that despite the ominous weather, I finished the book and though there are serious flaws in the storytelling, I’ll be remembering scenes from it for years to come.

There Are Rivers in the Sky has three main characters. Narin is a nine-year-old Yazidi girl in 2014 Turkey. The Yazidis have been reviled as ‘devil worshippers’ in the Mesopotamian region for centuries, subject always to genocides. Narin’s grandmother wants to take her to the Yazidis’ most sacred place so she can be baptised. They aren’t aware that ISIS is in the area.

Arthur grows up in the slums of Victorian London. A chance sighting of Mesopotamian artifacts being hauled into the British Museum inspires in him a curiosity about the ancient civilisation. A talent for finding patterns and making sense of them turns him into one of England’s foremost experts on the cuneiform writing system of the Mesopotamian region. Soon he’ll be travelling to Turkey on an archeological dig.

Zaleekhah, half Turkish, half British, is a hydrologist in 2018 London, melancholic since the deaths of her adventure-loving parents when she was a child. She’s scared of rivers but also loves them, especially now, in this era of climate change when clean and free flowing rivers will mark the difference between life and death for large populations around the world. Brought up by her uncle after her parents’ death, Zaleekhah will one day have to detangle love, gratitude, and basic humanity from the knot of emotions in her heart.

The storytelling in There Are Rivers in the Sky is not the best — it was easy to put the book down and days could pass before I picked it up again. But between the characters the author has created runs a gamut of human sentiment from hatred to love, compassion to cruelty, faith to indifference. Today, when news headlines numb many of us to the point of apathy, this book could be the shot of emotion that we need.

There Are Rivers in the Sky

By Elif Shafak

Viking

pp. 496; Rs 899