First Impressions
This is an immersive epic which I grew increasingly emotionally and intellectually involved with as it went on. When I finally closed the book I looked up and realised I'd been so lost in it that I'd lost track of everything around me. I also realised it was an incredibly rainy day in London, with rain streaming down the window, which tied in perfectly with the novel's central theme as water is at the heart of it.
Tributaries Becoming a River
What I find extraordinary about this novel is how Shafak takes characters who seem quite different from one another, living in very different places and periods, and gradually brings their stories together in a deeply touching way. They begin to fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle or, more fittingly given the theme, like tributaries and bodies of water that slowly join to form one flowing river. I won't give away any spoilers, but I can sketch out the main threads.
The novel opens in Mesopotamia in the seventh century BC with Ashurbanipal, a despotic leader and military commander who was also an intellectual. He amassed a great library of clay tablets, many taken from other cultures and countries, and it's from tablets in that library that we know the "Epic of Gilgamesh." That ancient tale runs through the whole novel, and it feels miraculous that it survived at all, given how many transformations it went through along the way.
In Victorian London we meet Arthur, born into extreme poverty to a mother who scavenged valuables from the city's wastewater, and nicknamed "King Arthur" by the other scavengers. He feels like a Dickensian character, rising from humble beginnings to an intellectual career thanks to an extraordinary memory that lets him recall the distant past in precise, picture-perfect detail. He's also a synaesthete, experiencing tastes and smells when he sees words. These gifts are a double-edged sword: they open doors for him, but they also make him an outsider and an object of curiosity. It's fitting that Charles Dickens himself makes a brief appearance in a couple of scenes, while looking for a new publisher, which is a fun touch.
The next thread follows Narin, a Yazidi girl who is about to be baptised on the banks of the Tigris in 2014, while her family and culture face growing pressure and real danger from military and political forces and the prejudice against them. And in 2018 in London we follow Zaleekhah, a hydrologist who has left her husband after marital difficulties and is moving onto a houseboat on the Thames at Chelsea. She comes from a very privileged, wealthy family. As the novel moves between these very different characters, their stories gradually link up.
Outsiders Who See Clearly
What connects them is that each experiences a great deal of loneliness and isolation, and each has a special ability or intelligence. They are slight outsiders, and I think that's why they see more clearly what's happening around them and begin to question the larger society, in which people are exploited and displaced. The final main character is a drop of water itself. We follow it through the centuries, with a consciousness and a memory, in a book premised on the idea that water holds memory as it passes through its many transformations. Water is so essential to life yet so misunderstood.
Whimsy and Wonder
This is where readers may divide. Shafak walks a fine line between whimsy and absurdity, especially in her recent novels. "The Island of Missing Trees" is partly narrated by a fig tree and by an insect, and some readers feel that tips too far into absurdity. For me, and for others, it's whimsical and a wonderful way of thinking outside the boxes of identity and consciousness we normally work within. That's what I find so moving about Shafak's writing: a heartfelt humanity runs through all her books, along with real sympathy for outsiders and people who don't conform to standard ideas of how a person should live or identify.
I read her whimsy as a way of saying we don't have to be stuck inside a narrowly human consciousness. We can become so accustomed to thinking of ourselves as a human race that dominates and controls the planet, when there are many workings and mysteries we don't understand, outside the mainstream narrative, that steer our lives in unexpected and fantastic ways. The novel has a great sense of wonder, playfulness and humour. One example is the lamassu, the Mesopotamian sculptures with a human head and a lion's body, which also have five legs. Several of them, along with many of the tablets from this famed lost library, now sit in the British Library. I want to read more about that, and about how the "Epic of Gilgamesh" has been passed down across centuries, both orally and in writing.
Hidden Rivers and Serious Themes
Zaleekhah's storyline describes the hidden rivers beneath London and every major city. We think of London and the mighty Thames, but there were many other rivers, which have been built or paved over or repurposed, and it was fascinating to see a map of them. For all its whimsy and humour, the novel also takes on serious themes through water. There's a lot on climate change and pollution, and on how we imagine we control rivers when we don't. Humanitarian crises are so often about a lack of water, with people in disadvantaged areas dying of thirst, and as climate change continues, water will become a major issue for many nations.
The Yazidi genocide is also depicted in the story, which I found heart-wrenching and which made me want to learn more. The theft of cultural artefacts features too, both in the ancient Mesopotamian library and in the contemporary British Museum, whose holdings were taken from so many cultures and remain a hotly debated subject. And there's organ farming, in which very wealthy people who need a transplant bypass the medical system and buy organs from impoverished or displaced people.
I think Shafak mostly strikes a good balance, handling these subjects while keeping the reader involved in the characters' lives. I felt so close to them that what they gradually saw around them, I was seeing too as a reader: the larger things at stake for many people, and the ways we are implicated in systems that should be questioned more. We become complacent because we're born or work our way into certain circumstances, or inherit a cultural outlook that makes us assume this is simply how the world is, and only gradually do we realise how it disadvantages others and what more sinister things we are part of without noticing.
The Reading Experience
The novel contains multitudes of stories and holds them all in one big epic tale. If you find the drop of water's consciousness, or the multiple storylines, a bit disparate at first, trust me that they all come together, and I found it incredibly moving how they form a whole.
Coincidentally while reading the novel I went to the Yoko Ono retrospective at Tate Modern, which sits right on the Thames. Looking out at the rain falling on the river, I thought of the river in this novel. Ono is such a singular conceptual artist, and some of her pieces appear as written prompts on the wall for viewers to carry out or simply imagine. One I read asks you to imagine a drop of water falling on a stone and watch until it eventually drills a hole through it, which of course would take many, many years. It connects so beautifully with this book, as another way of thinking about consciousness and narrative. Imagine being a drop of water, passing through solid and gas, rising into the sky and falling back to earth, perhaps swallowed and ingested along the way. That expands your mind beyond the limits of a single human life.
Verdict
That approach will work for some readers and not for others, and I know people who take issue with Shafak's work in this way, which is entirely fair. For me it was very moving and a wonderful form of storytelling, and I loved how the novel drew me through so many tales, periods and places to form one whole narrative. If you've read it, or want to now, I'd love to hear what you think.
