Elif Shafak’s latest novel is gloriously expansive and intellectually rich

A drop of water falls on the head of Ashur-banal, the erudite but merciless king of Assyria, as he walks through his capital, Nineveh. Having dissolved into the atmosphere, it reappears in 1840 as a snowflake that falls into the mouth of King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums, the fancifully named son of a mudlark, born on the banks of the Thames. After another 174 years that same droplet is found in a bottle in south-eastern Turkey to be used in the baptism of Narin, a nine-year-old Yazidi girl.

Water is both the unifying image and the dominant concern of Elif Shafak’s gloriously expansive and intellectually rich There Are Rivers in the Sky. After a brief prologue in seventh-century BC Mesopotamia, it consists of three strands. The first is that of Arthur Smith, a nineteenth-century working-class prodigy who, fascinated by the Assyrian exhibits in the British Museum, eventually decodes the Chaldean account of the Great Flood on the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, before leading archaeological expeditions to Nineveh.

The second strand concerns Narin and her family of Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking religious sect, denigrated as devil-worshippers by Christians and Muslims alike, and whose history, according to Narin’s grandmother, is one of “pain and persecution. Seventy-two times we have been massacred.” A seventy-third, at the hands of Islamic State, takes place during the novel.

The third strand focuses on Zaleekhah, a hydrologist who posits that water has a memory, a theory that has been widely derided, although not by Shafak, who offers several variations on the theme that “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”

Each strand has a particular flavor. Arthur’s presents a vivid depiction of both the richness and squalor of mid-Victorian London, peopled by real-life figures such as Gladstone and Dickens (much more sympathetically portrayed than in recent works by Martin McDonagh and Zadie Smith).Narin’s provides fascinating accounts of Yazidi Creation and Flood myths, in which humanity descends from Adam alone and the serpent is a savior. Zaleekhah’s focuses on contemporary environmental concerns, such as plastic pollution and eels contaminated with coffee and cocaine in the Thames and the ever-increasing threat of a devastating cholera epidemic in developing countries.

Although Arthur falls chastely in love with Narin’s great-great-grandmother in the course of his excavations and Zaleekhah encounters Narin at the novel’s climax, the different stories are connected not by plot but by a series of artefacts: lamassus, the Assyrian hybrid human-animal statues; a lapis lazuli tablet from Ashurbanal’s palace; Austen Henry Layard’s 1849 account of his visit to the Yazidis. These and others recur in different settings, their meaning repeatedly changing.

The primary connection, however, is water. Arthur declares that “the story of humanity cannot be written without the story of water.” In the novel, it is rivers and irrigation that shape civilization, while dams and pollution threaten it. Water both gives life (Narin’s grandmother reminds her that “You are made of water”) and destroys it, as in the flood that kills Zaleekhah’s parents and the cholera that kills Arthur and his younger brother.

At times, Shafak overextends the metaphor. That Zaleekhah’s friend Brennen’s name is Irish for “little drop of water” and her biscuits are baked with the cuneiform symbol for water seems forced. Elsewhere, however, this waterborne tale, crossing cultures, centuries and continents, is a magnificent achievement.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.