[I read this 2024 novel in its five parts, writing about each part before reading on—I never knew what was coming next. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
30 May 2026
Part 1, Raindrop
Elif Shafak loves props, things to hang her intertwining stories on. The corniest one in The Island of Lost Trees is a fig tree in Cyprus, endowed with a consciousness that persists even after it is destroyed, and a cutting is transplanted in London. It isn’t like Groot in The Guardians of the Galaxy, also a plant-based consciousness destroyed but for a twig which another character cultivates. Groot 2, or whatever he’s called, seems not to continue with Groot’s consciousness… but I’ll shut up about The Guardians of the Galaxy. And I’ll shut up about The Island of Lost Trees. Except to say that Shafak’s choice of prop this time is a raindrop. It falls on the head of the Abyssinian King Ashurbanipal, six centuries BCE. It falls, as a snowflake—I’m not making this up—into the mouth of a newborn in London in 1840. And, so far, it has also been trapped inside a phial of water to be used in an ancient sect’s baptism ceremony in 2014. A favourite subject for tired teachers to use as a story-writing activity in the last century was ‘A day in the life of a penny’. Welcome to ‘Two millennia in the life of a raindrop’.
I’ll come back to physical props, but I first want to mention the other type of props that Shafak loves. Running agendas. The immigrant experience, and the perplexed anxiety that displacement brings. Different attitudes to education, learning and books. Wealth and poverty. Power and powerlessness. Gender inequality, and the unsung faculties possessed by women. And, perhaps more overriding than any of these, mankind’s total lack of understanding of the dreadful environmental effects of our activities. Each of the four parallel stories—I haven’t mentioned another, set in London in 2018—contains most of these elements in different permutations. Like Shafak’s other props, they are sometimes too prominently presented. Look at me, I’m a comment on male entitlement. Look at me, I’m reminding you, again, what a mess our rivers are in. Elif Shafak has a lot she wants us to think about, and sometimes it can feel didactic, even repetitive.
Physical props. We meet two in Ashurbanipal’s story, the first, and plenty of thematic ones. Like, he’s full of learning and loves his library (check), but has a cruel (if squeamish) satisfaction in the absolute power he wields over his subjects (check). Oh, the treasures he has—including prop 1, the lapis lazuli tablet, prized both for its astonishing value and the scribe’s blasphemous addendum that dedicates it to the wrong god. Then there are his monumental guardians of the library, the statues of the mythical lamassus. Oh, and this is Mesopotamia, the land from which all exiles stem in this novel, and Nineveh is by the River Tigris.
Fast forward 2500 years to a different River T, the Thames, in 1840. A woman in penury (check) gives birth to a remarkable child as she scavenges on the filthy shore of the filthy river (check). This is Arthur—born on the same day as Queen Victoria’s first child, also Victoria, and named by the scavengers as King Arthur of the Sewers. He is proud of the title, we discover later, because it is inscribed on his tomb in—guess—the former Mesopotamia. He had been looking for some mystical link with the past, but we have no details yet. Obviously, he’s come a long way since his penurious childhood, thanks to his astonishing mind and other useful superpowers. He’s like Oliver Twist, able to show character qualities far beyond expectations (or plausibility), with the help of an overgenerous author. He gets a job with a kindly printer—William Bradbury of the real Bradbury and Evans, sentimentally fictionalised—who mentors him in a long list of great literature. There are a lot of lists in this book that Shafak helpfully supplies for us, and Arthur reads everything on the book list between the ages of twelve and fourteen. Good going.
Props: the river and other filthily flowing waters; the lamassus, on show at the British Museum—where Arthur also bumps into the curator of the right branch of archaeology; those lapis lazuli tablets at the Great Exhibition; a book about ancient Nineveh that he notices in the cruel headmaster’s study just before he fondles him obscenely and gives him 30-odd strokes of the cane on his bare buttocks. It’s printed by Bradbury and Evans, so he’s able to read it and set up his no doubt lifelong fascination. And one final link for now, depression. Arthur’s mother wants to die, and is only kept alive with laudanum. Bradbury kills himself, despite his prosperity and happy family life…
…both of which link to the two stories I haven’t come to yet, Narin’s on the banks of the Tigris in 2014 and Zaleekhah’s on the banks of the Thames in 2018. Narin’s grandmother is a wise woman—Shafak loves the ancient lore of women’s healing—a mender of sick minds, and a dowser. Good with humans and water, suggesting the kind of mystical links Shafak also loves. And guess what Zaleekhah wants to do with her life? End it, obviously, despite her success as—guess—a hydrogeologist. Her uncle, from the part of Turkey that was once Mesopotamia, thinks there’s nothing wrong with her that a quick return to her loveless marriage wouldn’t cure. Not that she’s telling him about her plan to do a Bradbury, obviously.
Narin’s story. She’s nine, I think, having a long-delayed secret baptism next to the Tigris. Her people are from the Yazidi faith—Shafak has her grandmother tell us all about its creation myth, involving descent from Adam’s seed only, not Eve’s. And, it becomes evident, they are a persecuted religion. One of their symbols is a healing serpent, so they are labelled as devil-worshippers—mentioned in the subtitle of the Victorian book about Nineveh, adding to its contemporary popularity—which, of course, is a typical inter-faith slur. (Mini-spoiler: I’ve just read that a near-genocide of this caste began in 2014, the year of Narin’s story.) I’ve mentioned the phial of Tigris water, and that she’ll have the final bit of her baptism in the Yazidis’ holiest location. But I haven’t mentioned that Narin is rapidly going deaf, and is unlikely to have any hearing left within a year.
I also haven’t mentioned that the materfamilias, Narin’s wise ol’ granny, is almost unbearably sentimental. She speaks in life-affirming cliches and has the almost intolerable habit of referring to Narin as some part of the body or other. Not just, ‘my heart,’ then? No. ‘When she misses Narin, she says, “Come and sit next to me, the corner of my liver”; when she wants to raise her spirits, she says, “Cheer up, the pulse of my neck”; when she cooks her favourite food, she says, “Eat up, the light of my eye….”’ Enough.
Zaleekhah. She was born in Manchester, her parents died when she was seven— while out running, she has a flashback to just before the event—and she’s now not doing what her mega-successful businessman uncle, recently made a life peer, would ever want for her. Either to be like his daughter, the perfect wife and mother, or choose a proper, i.e. well-paid, career. She loves her subject, has just moved into a rented a property that couldn’t be nearer the Thames if it tried—it’s a houseboat—and… is subject to terrible doubts. Is it to do with survivor guilt? We don’t know how her parents died over 20 years before, but she definitely didn’t and it doesn’t make her feel good. Her aunt and uncle were great surrogate parents, living in a house full of art and antiquities and with a daughter Zaleekhah’s age, but she’s always feeling somehow disorientated, out of place.
It’s a different sense of displacement from her uncle’s, which is all to do with the immigrant experience. When she graduated, his pride in her was also a kind of warning. ‘I’m so proud of you, habibti. I want you to be very successful. Remember, people like us cannot afford to fail. “People like us” … immigrants, exiles, refugees, newcomers, outsiders … Too many words for a shared, recognizable sentiment.’ Her sense of feeling like an outsider is different, and more difficult to cope with. Somehow, she just doesn’t seem to fit—and the only thing that calms the demons is running. I won’t ask the obvious question about what she’s running from. Oh, I have. And so has Shafak, putting it into the mouth of Zaleekhah’s estranged husband. ‘What are you trying to escape from, sweetheart?’ Not a subtle writer sometimes, Shafak
Meanwhile, there are dreadful inequalities and prejudices within the societies Shafak is focusing on, and the disquiet of the world as an almost conscious entity. She never uses the word Gaia, but it’s palpably there, in the rivers, the trees, the landscape we’re ravaging. In Narin’s story it’s the flooding of the Tigris basin for a new reservoir, displacing communities that go back millennia. In Arthur’s, it’s the Thames that is no better than a stinking open sewer. And in Zaleekhah’s it’s everything, down to the molecular level at which microplastics do their worst. She’s given herself until the end of her first month’s rent before she makes her final exit. It wasn’t a good sign that she broke the wing of her precious miniature lamassus in the move—but at least her uncle will still have the interesting Victorian book on Nineveh he’s acquired, and the lapis lazuli tablets he’s been taking an interest in. And he’ll be able to buy her a new lamassus.
I don’t know why Shafak sets such store by things that can be seen by the eye and held in the hands. But, I suppose, maybe that’s exactly it. You can’t buy a replacement for a lost heritage that’s older than Christianity, or a global ecology that’s going to ruin. When it’s gone, it’s gone.
Part 2, Mysteries of Water
It’s only now that I’m half-way through that I’ve realised what the problem is for me. Shafak is using the forms of poetry in a long-form novel. Long-form, as in not only does she have three parallel stories going on—King Ashurbanipal’s was only a kind of prologue—but she’s also telling them all in different ways. Narin’s is the most overtly poetic, in that Shafak has made the strongest voice in it that of the grandmother who speaks in poetry and gnomic pronouncements. Doesn’t she just love her metaphors, her knowing takes on myths that go back millennia, those guru-like aphorisms? It’s a risk for an author. Some readers might find her somewhat dull and repetitive, especially as Narin’s story progress so slowly it’s practically at a standstill. It’s mainly about Narin being told stuff by a grandmother who wants to present an alternative history, where the powerful figures are women, and men’s knowledge is at best superficial and at worst destructive.
Zaleekhah’s story isn’t exactly an action movie either. There’s a bit of back-story, although we’ve still learnt nothing of her parents’ death beyond the fact that water was involved. We go with her to the place she works and, crucially, find out about her former supervisor. He had a theory he referred to as aquatic memory: ‘He argued that, under certain circumstances, water – the universal solvent – retained evidence, or “memory”, of the solute particles that had dissolved in it, no matter how many times it was diluted or purified.’ His research sought to undermine the received scientific opinion, of course, and when it couldn’t be reproduced by peer reviewers he was finished. Unjust accusations of evidence-tampering were made, and they were enough to ruin his reputation. But one disciple of his knows not only how sincere he was, right up to his recent death, and it’s… guess. She knows there’s much more to water than her scientific colleagues want to know. These include (spit) her husband, which goes to show how doomed the relationship is….
And Shafak hasn’t finished with Zaleekhah yet. She knows she’s renting the houseboat from a tattoo artist, and assumes it’s one of those punky, gothy guys in a seedy shop full of low-lifes. But no, the tattoo parlour is a light, airy place run by a lovely woman—guess her heritage—and she specialises in an ancient form of script. Guess which. She demonstrates how the Mesopotamians pressed pointed nibs into soft clay—and the word she inscribes is Zaleekhah’s own name. I bet this section is full of references to rivers and watery stuff too, but I haven’t got time to check. Maybe later.
Arthur’s story whips along by comparison with the others, each chapter pushing forward his unlikely progress a year or more as he becomes the Turing-like codebreaker of the Assyrian tablets in the British Museum. His ability to see through the obscure cuneiform script and the syntax of an unheard language is only as magical as Narin’s grandmother’s talent for finding water, so I suppose we’ll just have to accept it. I guess it’s an author’s prerogative to create a universe in which such things are possible, like Zaleekhah’s ex-professor’s no doubt correct hunch about aquatic memory. Like the fictional prof, Arthur is based on a slightly less magically-endowed historical figure. Shafak loves to give reality a mystical tweak….
She also likes to go down didactic rabbit-holes. We get lessons in how Assyrian script is syllabic, not letter-by-letter, and about how the British Museum was only slowly becoming a centre for properly documented research. Up to now it had been a fairly haphazard repository of ‘artefacts purchased or donated, dug up or stumbled across, spirited away or outright stolen.’ (Thanks, Elif.) So Arthur fits right in, able to piece together connected stories where previously there had only been the piled-up trash of centuries. There really was an Arthur Smyth in the 1860s and 70s—except there wasn’t. Really, there was George Smith, the dedicated ex-engraver with Bradbury and Evans who spent his lunchtimes in the Assyrian collection at the British Museum. Do we think there was really a delirious Eureka moment when George (not Arthur) felt the urgent need to communicate how he had discovered a reference to the Great Flood centuries before biblical times?
Silly question. Shafak isn’t writing history, but offering what she hopes is a poetically cohesive vision of connections not dreamt of in our philosophy. That snowflake on the tongue of the newborn Arthur connected him with—or conveyed the essence of a memory of—a world going back over two millennia. It’s our own universe, but conveyed through a natural philosophy far beyond our own science, a universe of poetically conceived metaphorical connections.
My goodness. It would be wonderful, if only it were more convincing. Shafak’s language is so rooted in the metaphorical it becomes a rattle-bag of yoked-together ideas. My e-reader version of the novel lets me confirm that she peppers her stories with so many similes and metaphors they become repetitive. A search for the word ‘like’ will bring up several in every chapter. Many of them, the ones that snag the attention almost from the beginning, are water-connected. ‘But now a sense of foreboding tugs at his insides, like the pull of a river’s undercurrent.’ Or ‘the king … does not trust storytellers. Their imagination, unable to settle in one place, like the Tigris in springtime, changes course in a manner most unpredictable, meandering in ever-widening curves….’ Both of these are in the first few pages, where we also get the first appearance of the magical raindrop. Shafak is clearly setting out her poetic stall….
The imagery isn’t all as clunky as this, but it is persistent. From one of Arthur’s chapters: ‘Death roams the alleys, its earthy breath snuggling in closer as it slips through cracks in the walls and slides under doors, like the low fog.’ From one of Zaleekhah’s: ‘In her mind she traces her finger over Zuleikha’s wrinkles, each etched on her face as a punishment, branching out like the tributaries of ancient rivers, and she always imagines her as a liquid woman – assertive, bold, impatient, desiring something different….’
(It’s interesting that several of the more literary-minded reviewers have caught the bug. Here’s Robert Macfarlane: ‘Elif Shafak’s beautiful and moving new novel bears the reader along on its marvellous currents. Here, rivers twine with other rivers and lives with other lives across centuries and cultures, as the fate of a single drop of water weaves an intricate tapestry of love and loss.’ Philippa Gregory: ‘time dissolves in the timeless water of two rivers and the characters who live beside them. The story flows like the rivers from ancient Nineveh to present-day London….’ And one more for luck, Calum McCann: ‘Shafak finds the world in a drop of water. …. An extraordinary novel, fresh and cleansing, like the rain bouncing off the metal roof of our lives.’
Bounce, bounce.)
Part 3, Restless Rivers and Part 4, Memories of War
Hmm. Shafak blithely mixes magic realism and metaphor, and… what? A little of this would go a long way—and Shafak doesn’t go for a little of anything. I’ve mentioned her over-reliance on similes, but in this second half of the novel what she really loves is the extended metaphor. ‘A poem is a swallow in flight. You can 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.’ This particular image, appearing three quarters of the way through, seems like a mission statement. If this novel really is a kind of long-form poem, the swallow in flight goes some way towards explaining it. She has urgent truths to deal with, and to do that she needs to take flight.
What am I talking about? Basically, Shafak wants her intertwining stories to come together as one satisfying whole. Almost anything she includes in the narratives, and in the commentaries voiced either by the narrator or one of the characters, is there for this purpose. The good news is, everything is starting to come together nicely. That’s the magic part of magic realism. The bad news is, it’s quite hard to stay in touch with the realism. Every encounter is part of Shafak’s grand scheme, which means that the presentation and development of every character come to seem far too schematic. Those playful little connections, particularly the water-drop and lamassus, become secondary. They are still there, but it’s as though Shafak wants us to see that if there is such a thing as aquatic memory—and in this universe there definitely is—it’s more or less identical to what happens in humans. Basically, we’re are all a part of each other. We might be individuals, like those cute little water drops, but we are all connected.
- I’ll gloss over for now the fact that from the start I never bought into the idea of the water drop somehow retaining its integrity over millennia. A molecule yes, but that’s not how it’s referred to. And anyway, the only way it can be analogous to the human connections Shafak insists on is through a leap of poetic faith. She might be able to make that leap, but it’s a big task to take the reader with her. The big push she makes in these sections is that even though all the connections appear as though by magic, this is the reality of our connected human existence. Well, maybe.
So what happens? To start with, Shafak needs Arthur to become a cutting-edge archaeologist in what was once Nineveh. Those superpowers of his are useful, causing his reputation to grow without his wanting it—at exactly the moment in history when archaeological finds are becoming a source of national prestige. Egypt is already being plundered—thanks for the reminder, Elif—and Mesopotamia is seen as a less interesting version… or it had been before Arthur’s spectacular discovery of the Flood tablet. There had been a lot of ad hoc digging at Ashurbanipal’s palace earlier in the century, but now the French are interested—and so is the Daily Telegraph. Its owner will sponsor an expedition, led by Arthur himself.
Cue, over many chapters, Arthur’s growing appreciation of the possibilities now open to him. Notably, he will be able to search for a missing tablet, part of the great Gilgamesh epic he has recently become passionate about. He’ll find it, obviously, because it’s that sort of novel, but first he’s got to get there. When he arrives in Constantinople, he thinks he’s practically at journey’s end. He isn’t, as the suave ambassador lets him know, because the local pasha needs to trust the Brits before he will issue a firman. Cue plenty of opportunities for Shafak to bang on about the huge mismatch between entitled privilege and this skinny young man raised in the riverside slums. His prodigy status is irrelevant in the palatial embassy, and he spends uncomfortable weeks not fitting in. The toffs eventually take pity on him, and a Turkish dragoman is employed to take him around the city. Everyone thinks he’ll become so enchanted he’ll never want to leave. In particular, everyone thinks, he’ll never forget the astonishing sophistication of the bordello…
…and they are right. A woman plays an instrument he doesn’t recognise, and he is captivated. ‘Beautiful,’ he says, and the dragoman is pleased. Except Arthur means the instrument, a qanun—and we don’t need to be the most alert of readers to remember that Narin’s father is a master of this very instrument. Literally. We know by the end of Part 4 that Arthur gives the qanun—salvaged from a great fire—to the young woman in the village where he is staying. And this isn’t just any village, but a Yazidi village, where he has been made to feel more welcome than he ever has been before. And the young woman is a seer, a faqra—and when we her her name, Leila, we know she must be Narin’s great-great-grandmother, the most extraordinary of all the faqras. And Arthur finds her extraordinary too, as she sleepwalks (or trance-walks) most nights. He whispers that he loves her, below the level of hearing. She hears him anyway.
There’s another link to our own century. Leila has a hideous vision of a terrible event, some time in the future. It’s some kind of incursion of some sort, a massacre perhaps, and we think she might be foreseeing the one that is happening in Narin’s story 140 years later. Maybe it is—but we have been following the anti-Yazidi feeling in Arthur’s time-line too, and we remember that it’s part of Narin’s grandmother’s own stories that Leila had to leave her village for some reason. Was there an attempt at ethnic cleansing in the 1870s as well? Is that what Leila escaped from? Whatever, time is coming together in just the way Narin’s grandma says it does. And in the way Sharik likes.
Narin’s story, as usual, is mainly about her grandma’s homilies and mystical wisdom. But it’s also about attempted genocide, and all Shafak needs to do is have her characters walk through their prescribed script. Yes, the anticipated visit to the holy place in Iraq is definitely going to happen—and, before they get there, they stay in a Yazidi village. Guess which one. Soon, Grandma is sensing some mystical straws in the wind—then news starts to filter through about ISIS on the prowl in other Yazidi settlements. Meanwhile Narin’s father is stuck, deeper into Iraq, and is in a different village when ISIS comes to call. All the men, more than 60 of them, are lined up around an empty water cistern. Surely they aren’t all going to be held prisoner in such barbarous conditions? No—they’re all shot instead. Only one of them survives….
Something similar has happened in the village where Narin and her grandma are staying, and she and her grandma are refugees now. The only hope for the women and children seems to be what other religions call Mount Sinai. But it’s hot and arid, and everybody knows that water must be found at any price. Some young boys are sent down to find any water they can, but ISIS are policing every possible place and the boys don’t return. Grandma has already been sharing her last small canteen of water with other families, and soon she only has one drop left to give Narin. Remember the water drop that landed on the old king’s head all those chapters ago? That’s the one she gives Narin. Bless. But now Grandma will have to brave the dangers and go out dowsing. ISIS gunmen spot her, let her know she’s about to die—and then she hears Narin’s voice calling her. She couldn’t let her grandmother go off alone, could she? And… that’s where Part 4 ends.
As for Zaleekhah, whose timeline is four years later…. Nothing much, except she has a birthday and we find out how much she had always hated birthdays without her parents. They had been drowned by a flash-flood on a camping trip, and nothing would ever be the same for poor little Z. But, during these chapters, her social life has taken a small turn for the better. Nen, the tattoo artist, has been to the houseboat with a plumber to fix a leak and, well, she and Zaleekhah get on famously. They seem to be on the same page with regard to absolutely everything, and when Uncle tells Zaleekhah to bring a ‘plus one’ to her birthday dinner, guess who she invites. And guess who has very recently broken up with her long-term female lover. And guess which Turkish author fairly recently came out as bisexual. OK, this might not be the start of a beautiful gay friendship, but it’s looking as if Nen and Zaleekhah are definitely following a script. And, while they’re spending some quality time together, Zaleekhah has a tiny tattoo done. It’s ‘Water’ in cuneiform script.
So where are we? There’s some resolution to be found in all the timelines, and we can bet everything will be connected. Arthur, we know, is under suspicion from the pasha—he can’t believe he’s only looking for lost lines from an epic poem—and he’s got to return to England. Luckily, on what (I think) turns out to be his last day, guess what he finds. He’s happy to go home and tell all—but he’ll be back. We know this, because the tomb near Narin’s village is his, dated four years later. It will be drowned, just like all the Yazidi villages. As for Narin and her grandmother…. How are they going to get out of their little scrape? Will Grandma show the nasty men her superpower and find them some water? And will this somehow connect with Zaleekhah’s specialism four years into their own future? Their village will be drowned, and they will need all the help they can get. Zaleekhah has already found all the help she needs, in Nen. Uncle had tried to dominate at the birthday dinner with all his materialist talk, but Nen had stood up to him. It’s exactly what Zaleekhah will have to learn if she’s to sort out her almost lifelong insecurities. Through Nen, a friendly author is showing her there’s a whole connected universe out there.
Part 5, Flood—to the end…
…plus a long Note to the Reader and Acknowledgments section that take up another ten pages. In these two sections Shafak helpfully tells us more or less every book and expert she’s consulted in the writing of her novel, and… who cares? She has worn her research on her sleeve from the beginning, and to add a de facto references section is definitely not needed. The problem is that Shafak has a journalist’s mind, and she’s something of a completist. She wants to tell us everything, and it’s a big mistake. It only becomes worse in this final section.
But it’s a novel, so Shafak has loose ends to tie up. We know how Arthur’s story will end, but not why there’s a four-year gap between his first and second expeditions. When his reputation had been at its height in Part 3, before his expedition,he had been invited to a lot of middle- and upper-class soirees. And, to his mortification, he had been regarded as an eligible catch. Mabel, a middle-class young woman, had been charmed by this wide-eyed romantic, and thinks he would make a good husband. He, of course, has no idea how to politely say no, so he doesn’t—and when he leaves on his expedition, she considers herself engaged. He doesn’t disabuse her… and as soon as he returns she tells him they need to start planning.
Ah, difficult. He has only left Nineveh—I nearly typed ‘Nirvana’—because he has to. The Museum needs him to publicise his latest spectacular find although, basically, he would stay forever if he could. Aside from his work, there is only one love in his life, and she doesn’t live in London. But what’s a man to do? Travel home, of course, and do the expected thing. A few chapters into Part 5, he’s married with twins, and Mabel presents herself as the archetypal put-upon woman. She has absolutely no understanding of his obsession—and, basically, Arthur has no understanding of why anyone less single-minded might settle down in England and become a family man. Although, as he’s dying of cholera a few weeks after his arrival at the Tigris, he does feel some regret that he hadn’t been a better father.
There’s a gruesome symmetry in his death. Firstly, he had always blamed himself for the death of his brother when he brought water from the famously contaminated source in London. (Of course, this had been the cue for Shafak to offer us a lesson in waterborne diseases in London in Part 1.) Secondly, we discover in Part 5 that Zaleekhah had always blamed herself for her parents’ water-borne deaths. Leila had assured Arthur he wasn’t to blame. Of course, it’s the all-seeing Nen who offers the same assurance to Zaleekhah.
This is what I mean about Shafak sacrificing too much in terms of plausible characterisation. She’s desperate to cover her long list of issues, and she’s going to make those connections whatever the cost. Nen is the person she is because Shafak needs her to be—a gay woman who has reached an almost beatific sense of her own identity and worth through struggles Shafak doesn’t feel the need to go into. She’s a reformed alcoholic, a long-term relationship has just ended, and she has the same heritage as both Zaleekhah’s family and Narin’s. And the same connection to water. And the same fondness for its cuneiform version. And the same ability to see into people’s souls as Narin and her forebears. But she’s far less than the sum of these parts—to call her one-dimensional would be a compliment.
This is the cost. Nen is always, always there for her new friend—Shafak doesn’t want us to worry about how she ever makes any money—and we know Zaleekhah will only become her real self through her influence. But she’s a cipher. When, in the final chapter, they both meet Narin—tell you later—the connection is that Sumerian sign for water. Narin recognises it on Zaleekhah’s wrist, because it’s what was tattooed on her grandmother’s forehead. As a metaphor of timeless, water-bound connection, it’s as one-dimensional as so much else in this novel. And I’m sorry, Elif, this isn’t what real, human connections are founded on.
Zaleekhah meets Narin through some tortuous plot manoeuvres. If this is what it costs for Shafak to present her vision of mystical connections, then so be it. The set-up had come in Parts 3 and 4, when we hear that Zaleekhah’s sister Helen’s little daughter has a possibly inoperable kidney disease. Who can be a donor? In Part 5, if we haven’t guessed (we do as soon as we know it’s a Yazidi girl), is Narin. She’s spent the past four years a slave, being sold on from serial abuser to abuser, and Uncle tells Zaleekhah he’ll bring her to England, get her properly educated, give her a life she could never have dreamed of. And the new Zaleekhah finds enough courage to be able to call it by its name. Organ harvesting, the latest form of post-colonial exploitation.
Shafak is playing for high moral stakes here. Zaleekhah tells Helen what her father is planning—in fact, in a pointless little stub of character development, we discover it’s her mother who’s really been negotiating it—and Helen is mortified too. The deal’s off. Which would beg the question of where that leaves poor Narin, if Shafak lets things run their course. What can a couple of London women do to prevent the inevitable? Easy, obviously. Make the impossible moral dilemma go away by buying Narin from her current owner—and don’t think about the thousands of others who won’t be rescued by the two do-gooders who parachute in to save one of them. But that’s OK. Zaleekhah will be able to feel good about offering Narin what her aunt and uncle would have given her, but better. And with no strings attached.
We know exactly what Narin will be leaving behind, because Shafak has spent pages describing the atrocities against women and girls perpetrated by ISIS. You don’t need the details, because even though the actual rapes and killings happen offstage, we get to know about far more than is necessary for Shafak to make her point. It fits into her agenda of misogyny, of course, a theme she’s very keen to package up nicely by the end. But it also gives her another link to the way cultures pander (literally in some cases) to the desires of the highest bidder. ISIS, whilst being keen to video their own gleeful destruction of big infidel artefacts, runs a lucrative sideline in the sale of more portable items. So the trafficking of girls and heritage—it’s hard to imagine a group whose activities Shafak could hate more.
Am I nearly there yet? While we’re in her timeline, Narin manages to escape death and sidestep the rape going on all around her. And when Zaleekhah finally gets to meet her, all that nastiness she must have lived through in the intervening four years is in the past. It’s interesting—as in, slightly bizarre—that Shafak doesn’t tie up some very loose ends. Narin is rescued, and she won’t have to face the kind of hoops Zaleekhah felt she had to jump through for her uncle. But what on earth will life in London be like for her, assuming that’s where she goes? Or in a deeply problematic Turkey or Iraq?
Meanwhile, how about Zaleekhah’s uncle? After she thwarts his plan to purchase Narin’s kidney (for money, and for whatever rewards he feels will justify his behaviour), he isn’t speaking to Zaleekhah. So, that hoped-for reconciliation between him and the heritage he rejects, which Shafak hinted would be achieved through Nen’s kindly offices, will simply have to wait. Shafak hasn’t got long enough time for that, sorry, any more than she has time to truly resolve Narin’s future. The beginning of a sense of trust, achieved through her recognition of Zaleekhah’s ‘water’ tattoo, will simply have to be enough.
Have I said enough? About Arthur, for instance, and the lapis lazuli fragment that gets stolen from him before his death? And, no doubt, the same fragment that Narin finds among the ISIS commander’s possessions? Which must be the one that Uncle is so interested in four year later…. It’s another neat tying-up of a running thread—the exile buys the treasure looted from his own ancestral heritage—and it ties in, equally nicely, with the cultural misogyny thread. (Shafak’s plot diagrams, if she made them, would definitely be something to behold.) The blasphemous addendum on the lapis lazuli tablet, first mentioned in Chapter 1, refers to a discredited goddess: ‘Now and always, Praise be to Nisaba. The king’s expression hardens as he takes in these last words. He frowns, his pulse throbbing angrily in his temples. Nisaba – the goddess of storytelling – is … a name consigned to oblivion. Her days are over, even though she is still revered in remote corners of the empire by a few ignorant women who cling to the old lore.’
This is the ancient king’s thought—and, of course, Shafak wants us to know that nothing has changed in the intervening 2600 years. It isn’t until the all-seeing Nen tells Zaleekhah all about the goddess, in a four-page lecture—I know you won’t find that hard to believe—that we realise how deep-rooted the fear and loathing of women goes. In the earliest creation myths, Nisaba played a key part, although gradually her influence dwindled. She became the goddess of story-telling, and scribes would praise her for her kind assistance. But that was still too much for the culture and, gradually, she was let go and replaced. In Ashurbanipal’s time, only dedications to the male god Nabu were allowed—except one slipped through the net. This is why the lapis lazuli tablet, with the blasphemous dedication, could only be seen by the king himself. The patriarchy won’t allow the merest hint of insubordination.
Anything else? Probably—but, for me, that’s enough. And maybe, one day, Shafak will understand that if you have important points to make, you don’t have to write exhaustively about each one in a single novel. A sprinkling of authorial magic is definitely not enough to join up this many dots.
We can read it for you wholesale 