Description
Water, in Elif Shafak’s telling, remembers everything. This is a seductive premise for a novel, and also a convenient one — it lets her yoke together three timelines separated by millennia without needing to justify the stitching. A raindrop lands on King Ashurbanipal’s scalp in seventh-century Nineveh; that same drop, we’re meant to understand, touches a Yazidi girl named Narin in 2014 Turkey and a hydrologist called Zaleekhah on a Thames houseboat in 2018. The cycle of evaporation and condensation becomes the novel’s organizing metaphor, its structural spine, its claim to cosmic significance. I spent years working on river systems in Southeast Asia before turning to writing, and something about the way Shafak deploys hydrology here kept nagging at me — the science made decorative, pressed into service as mysticism.
The book braids its three narratives with careful symmetry. Ashurbanipal guards his library, particularly a forbidden blue tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh dedicated to the goddess Nisaba rather than the sanctioned male deity Nabu. Arthur Smyth, born to a dying mother on the frozen banks of the Thames in 1840 and raised by toshers — sewer scavengers — possesses an eidetic memory that eventually pulls him toward Mesopotamian archaeology. Narin, a Yazidi child going deaf from a genetic condition, faces the destruction of her village by the Ilisu Dam and, later, the horrors of the 2014 genocide. Zaleekhah, a water scientist of Middle Eastern descent, drifts through the wreckage of her marriage on a Chelsea houseboat. Water connects them all; the raindrop is a recurring character, granted its own interiority. “For, unlike humans, water has no regard for social status or royal titles,” Shafak writes early on, establishing the register — earnest, declarative, slightly pedagogical.
Shafak writes gorgeous set pieces. The Nineveh sections hum with accumulated historical detail: the lamassus with their five legs, the cedar box containing the lapis lazuli tablet, the scent of sesame oil in bronze lamps. Her Victorian London is equally vivid — the toshers groping through sewage tunnels, the gas lamps, the fat stink of the Thames. She has done immense research, and mostly she wears it well. But the novel’s architecture creates a problem she never quite solves. Each timeline, interrupted just as it gathers momentum, returns at a slightly lower emotional temperature. Arthur’s discovery of the lamassus at the British Museum — a scene that crackles with genuine wonder, the boy pressing his face through the railings — gets undercut by the jump to Zaleekhah unpacking boxes on her houseboat, a sequence that reads more like domestic realism marking time.
The Narin sections carry the book’s moral weight, and here Shafak writes with controlled fury about the Yazidi genocide. But I found myself resisting the way the novel frames Narin’s deafness as parallel to the silencing of her people. The metaphor is too neat. Narin’s hearing “will contract from the outer margins, like curtains closing on the last act of a play” — the simile is lovely in isolation, but it does work the novel shouldn’t ask it to do, turning a child’s medical reality into a symbolic apparatus. Shafak clearly cares deeply about the Yazidi community, and her “Note to the Reader” acknowledges the care she took with oral traditions and regional variations in practice. That seriousness makes the moments of over-determined symbolism feel like failures of trust, as though she worried the reader wouldn’t see the connections without signposts.
Zaleekhah is the weakest strand. She exists partly to deliver the novel’s thesis about “aquatic memory” — the idea that water retains traces of what it once dissolved — and partly to provide a contemporary emotional anchor. Her estranged husband, her overprotective uncle, her houseboat neighbours: these feel like furniture arranged around an absence. When the novel explains that her predecessor on the houseboat theorized that “each droplet of water maintained a unique structure, distinguishable from the next, marked forever by what it once contained,” I wanted the book to push back against its own conceit. The memory-of-water hypothesis has been repeatedly debunked. Shafak doesn’t need it to be literally true — it functions as metaphor — but by presenting it through a scientist character without any skepticism, she collapses the distance between poetry and pseudoscience in a way that weakened my trust.
What rescues the novel, oddly, is its maximalism. Shafak is not interested in restraint. She piles on — Ovid epigraphs, Yeats, Hafiz, flood myths from Gilgamesh to Noah, the Peacock Angel, Queen Victoria giving birth on the same night Arthur enters the world among the toshers. The accumulation eventually becomes its own argument: that stories, like water, pool and merge and refuse to stay in the channels dug for them. Ashurbanipal understood this. He built his library to control narrative, to ensure all tablets praised Nabu rather than Nisaba. The blue tablet’s survival is the novel’s quiet engine — the idea that what gets suppressed doesn’t vanish but goes underground, surfaces elsewhere.
The closing image stays with me despite my objections. A droplet rises from the Tigris, freezes, falls as snow over London onto a newborn child. “And if we could only see the world through a baby’s eyes, gazing up with innocent wonder, we could watch the rivers in the sky.” There’s something unearned about the sentiment, and I think Shafak knows it. She’s asking for wonder she hasn’t fully justified. But the image works anyway — not because the novel proved its thesis, but because it spent five hundred pages insisting, with a persistence Ovid might have recognized, that connection exists whether or not we consent to see it. The question the book can’t answer is whether that insistence is the same thing as evidence. I don’t think it is. I’m not sure it matters.
If you’d like to read the full book in EPUB or MOBI format, feel free to send me an email—I’d be happy to share a free copy with you. Please reach me at: thenovaleaf@gmail.com
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