There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak review – story of a raindrop

This ambitious, multi-perspective novel about the politics and preciousness of water ranges from ancient Mesopotamia to contemporary London

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.

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