[I am reading this 2024 novel in its five parts, writing about each part before reading on. So far I have read Parts 1 and 2. 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. Shafik 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. Shafik’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. Shafik 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.)
We can read it for you wholesale 