Why was I disappointed by a novel that everyone else seems to love? Follow me as I try to find the answers.
Maybe I’m wrong about this one. I mean, Ruth Ozeki calls it an odyssey, an epic, a lament, a clarion call and a masterpiece, all in one short blurb. Mary Beard calls it a “brilliant, unforgettable novel”, while Nadifa Mohamed calls it “Literature on a grand scale.” Critics, novelists and Goodreads reviewers all seem to be competing over how much praise they can heap on There Are Rivers in the Sky, the new novel by Elif Shafak published in August.
So why did it leave me cold? After all, I’ve read and enjoyed many of Shafak’s previous novels. I listed 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World as one of my best books of 2019. And I love the concept of a historical epic with the characters all linked across space and time by their interaction with a single drop of water.
There are also some beautiful and poignant moments throughout the book, especially in the sections involving Narin, a young Yazidi girl living a peaceful life with her grandmother by the banks of the Tigris until they encounter the brutality of ISIS. Shafak’s writing is never bad, and I certainly didn’t hate this book. But I didn’t agree with any of the quotes and reviews. It was admirable in many ways but ultimately disappointing for me.
I think there are several reasons for this: one structural, one conceptual, and one to do with character.
1. Disconnected Narratives
The first is that the strands are too disparate. We start with King Ashurbanipal in ancient Nineveh, and then we skip forward to Arthur, a baby being born in the Victorian slums of 1840s London, and then we spend some time with Narin in 2014 before skipping ahead to Zaleekah, a depressed academic living on a London houseboat in 2018. The king is quickly abandoned, and most of the novel involves switching between the other three narratives.
All the characters are connected by that drop of water as it completes its long cycle of falling as rain, flowing out to sea, etc. It’s a beautiful image showing the unseen connections across time and space, but it’s quite tenuous as a way of linking narratives. They’re also brought together in the denouement, but it didn’t feel particularly satisfying to me and wasn’t enough to justify almost 500 pages of entirely separate stories.
2. Undercooked Characters
The second problem is in the characters themselves. Arthur gets the most airtime of the three, and although on the surface it was a compelling story of rising from poverty to become an expert on Mesopotamian artefacts and to uncover the mysteries of the Epic of Gilgamesh, I struggled to maintain much interest. It felt more like a biography of a historical figure than a story about a human being.
That was very surprising to me because one of the strengths of Shafak’s writing in the past has been her ability to create characters who feel utterly real and compelling. That wasn’t the case for me with Arthur Smyth. Maybe it’s because we skim through his whole life at high speed, never lingering long enough on interesting details. For example, Arthur has a perfect memory—he never forgets anything, and he can recall not just details and conversations from years ago but even the snowdrop that fell on him as he was born in the mud and filth on the banks of the Thames. This could have been explored in very interesting ways, as Jorge Luis Borges did in his short story “Funes the Memorious”, in which the teeming particulars that crowded a man with a perfect memory made it impossible for him to generalise. But in There Are Rivers in the Sky, it mostly just functioned to make Arthur more of a genius and less of a believable character.
Zaleekah was potentially interesting because she was so clearly lost and as a reader you want to know why, but she spent most of the novel in denial about the problems besetting her, and we spent so little time with her that her epiphany, when it came, felt underwhelming.
As for Narin, it was fascinating to get a glimpse of Yazidi culture, which I encountered a little in my travels in Armenia and Georgia and was happy to see rendered so well in fiction. Hers is the most interesting narrative, which is strange since she’s just an innocent nine-year-old kid. The other two characters should have offered more complexity, but the opportunities were missed.
3. Research Overwhelm
The third problem is, I think, related to the other two. There was clearly an enormous amount of research involved in creating There Are Rivers in the Sky, and it shows. What I mean is that in trying to convey the wealth of research she uncovered, I think Shafak undercooked the most important things in a novel: character and plot. At times, she just has the characters convey chunks of research to us in their conversations, and at others, they offer opinions on things like the theft of artefacts for European museum collections—opinions I generally agreed with but didn’t need to have spelled out for me like that.
Ultimately, I think perhaps the concept of the novel contained its flaws for me (and perhaps also what other people loved about it). Water is perhaps the antithesis of a fictional character: it flows and shapes the world around it but has no desires, no goals, no hopes and fears. The attempts to make raindrops and rivers into characters fell flat for me, and the water-based structure felt too amorphous, too difficult to grasp. Yet these are perhaps the very qualities that all those other readers loved.
So take my thoughts on There are Rivers in the Sky with a large pinch of salt, check out other reviews, and by all means give this one a try. I’ve focused more on the negatives here because I was trying to understand why my reaction differed so wildly from almost everyone else’s, but the novel does have plenty of good features too. You can do a lot worse than reading it, but you can also do a lot better—pretty much anything from Shafak’s back catalogue is better than this. I’d recommend Honour, The Island of Missing Trees, and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World in particular.
There are 19 comments
What a bummer the book didn’t really work for you. It’s always extra disappointing when you’ve read and liked other books by the author. I have this one in my TBR pile on my desk and hope to get to it in the coming months. It’s a big pile though, so you never know 😀
Hey Stefanie, this comment makes me very happy. Elif Shafak’s book may not have worked for me, but I’ve FINALLY succeeded in getting comments working again on my site!! Thanks for letting me know about the problem and for persevering in leaving a comment despite all the issues recently 🙂
And on the bright side for you, There Are Rivers in the Sky does have a beautiful cover design, so it will make an aesthetically pleasing addition to your TBR pile.
Well we’ll see what happens when I finally get around to the book 🙂
So glad you got your comments working again!
Thanks for this full and thoughtful review Andrew. I quite enjoyed 10 Minutes but was not bowled over, so will probably not go for this one.
Hi Mandy, good to hear from you! I don’t generally write negative reviews, but sometimes I find it useful to try to work out why a particular book didn’t do what I thought it should. Glad it was helpful for you too.
I know what you mean, that sense of “what did I miss” when not only are the blurbs and interviews and supporting materials all positive but one has personal experience with the author’s work that’s positive too. Sometimes I think it’s just timing. But I can also recall many instances of that burdensome-expertise that has saturated novels that I otherwise loved (even when I found the research itself fascinating). It’s hard to edit out parts of reviews that are interesting but weigh things down and detract from the overall piece (when one has a word limit, I mean, not just casually bookchatting), so I can only imagine how much harder it could be to delete entire sections of research that really resonated for the author but might not actually fit in the finished manuscript. Did it put you off so badly that you’d hesitate to read another? (I’ve read The Bastard of Istanbul and one other, also very early.)
Yes, it must be hard to delete research that’s fascinating but not quite relevant. I think it infected the characters too—Arthur Smyth is apparently based on a real historical figure, so perhaps that’s why his sections came across to me more like a biography than a compelling human story.
I think I probably will read more Shafak books, but I’ll probably go backwards rather than forwards. I’m very interested in The Bastard of Istanbul, for instance, but I won’t be rushing to try her next one.
Elif Shafak always receives heaps, tons of praise, no matter what book of hers is in question, so I am not at all surprised. That’s her bubble and publishing influence. Sure, I also consider 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World “good”, but that’s where I stopped in 2019. She puts out a book a year, this is to be expected. “Disconnected narratives” and “undercooked characters” – I find it true re a number of her books, though you do recommend Honour, and I haven’t read that one, and am now intrigued. Thanks for this review. I do appreciate your honesty, and think that critical reviews are essential for readers to make good judgements and think critically.
Hi Diana, Yes, I think the publishing industry tends to work like that. Shafak has been shortlisted quite a lot for her recent books, so the assumption is that she’s due a win, and people don’t want to look stupid by panning a future Booker winner. And there’s a lot of mutual back-scratching going on in the blurb-writing business, I’m sure.
I do think Shafak deserved the attention in the first place for her earlier work, though, and would definitely recommend Honour. I’m also intrigued by The Bastard of Istanbul and may try that one next—maybe this is a case where reading backwards through her catalogue would be more rewarding.
I’m so glad I found your review, because I completely agree with it. I just let the book go last night, after about 70 pages, and I feel relieved. I actually found the writing to be trite. I also hate when a writer spells everything out for the reader. It’s my first book of hers, and was sucked in by the blurbs, esp Mary Beard! I think these writers must be friends and give each other nice blurbs. Too much purple prose and corny dialogue. I was really disappointed. My standards for literature are high, though, I admit.
Hi Gail, Thanks for stopping by. Good for you on two counts: first for having high standards for literature, and second for letting go of a book that’s not working for you. I tend to soldier on to the end, and it rarely pays off when things have got off to a bad start.
Sorry that this was your first Shafak. If you ever want to try another of hers, I can recommend earlier books like Honour. But I get the impression you probably won’t, and I can understand why. Better luck next time!
I’m glad to see that someone else felt as I did. The New York Times review was gushingly positive (The Guardian review was spot on) and I felt so flummoxed by that. I am a writing teacher of high school seniors and I swear I could’ve picked out so many sentences that I would ask them to rewrite. So much telling, so little showing, way too much was unbelievable in its connections; overall not convincing. Like others there were parts I liked, especially learning of the Yazidi culture and the genocide with ISIL, which I’m embarrassed to say I did not know about. I love Gilgamesh, and I love learning about Mesopotamia. But in terms of writing quality, this book was quite weak.
Hi Bean, Thanks for stopping by. I hadn’t seen that Guardian review, but you’re right, he hits on a lot of the flaws that I was trying to identify in my post. I think writers get to a point of fame where editors either don’t dare ask them to rewrite things or don’t care because they know the book will sell anyway. But this book could really have benefited from serious editing to bring out all those good elements and iron out the flaws.
Hi Andrew,
I didn’t realize you’re a fiction writer and a reviewer. Your list of reads intrigues me–I have not read many of them, but I’ll put them on my list. I did read Our Missing Hearts, and I absolutely agree with you on that one, too. Which of your books should I read first?
I’m a writing teacher (30+ years), but it’s time for me to peace out in our current AI world. Though most of my students remain authentic and truly want to write their own words and ideas, I can see where this is all going. The Ed tech companies want us to “prepare our students for jobs of the future” by becoming prompt engineers.
I look forward to additional book reviews from you. And it looks like you subscribed to my blog. Not much traffic on mine, but I read a lot, and as a writing teacher, about the only writing, I have time to do are my book reviews.
Ah, I agree with you about AI. The pace at which we’re handing over more and more chunks of human creativity to machines is astonishing. I’m hoping that we’ll still value things like art and creative writing even when AI can produce it at the click of a button, in the same way we value the individuality of handmade textiles even though machines have long been able to create flawless results. It’s good to hear that most of your students still want to write in their own words, and I’m sure you’ve been able to pass along some of the love of literature that’s evident from your blog.
Thanks for asking about my books. You could start with my debut novel, On the Holloway Road. It’s old now and was never a huge best-seller anyway so you probably won’t find it in bookshops, but it’s on Amazon etc. It’s about a couple of young Londoners who try and fail to recreate the epic American road trip in the narrow confines of modern Britain.
By the way, ChatGPT tells me that “There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak is a richly layered narrative, drawing readers into a world where time, culture, and geography intersect.” Not only that, but “Shafak’s prose flows with a vivid, almost poetic quality,” and the book “rewards readers with a powerful, immersive experience that resonates long after the final page.” So I guess we must both be wrong after all!
Because she’s not very good – bottom line. Shafak seems to have bewitched European and western audiences with her romanticised, folksy tales of Turkey, but it is not a country recognised by most people who live there. Its Turkey – lite for people who know very little about the modern republic. Orhan Pamuk is in a completely different sphere of ability. Not all of Shafaks novels together as whole can hold a light to the The White Castle, The Black Book or the utterly staggering My Name is Red. I’m mystified as to why respected authors like Ian McEwan, Hanif Kureshi and Arundhati Roy seem to have fallen for her.
Hi Lou, As I mentioned in my post, I’ve enjoyed previous books by Shafak, so I don’t agree that she’s not very good. I do agree with you that Orhan Pamuk is a better writer, but that’s a tough comparison since he’s a Nobel Prize winner. I don’t know anything about how Shafak is perceived in Turkey except for the common snippet that she’s “the most widely read woman writer in Turkey”, so I’d be interested to learn more about that if you can recommend any links. Thanks!
Elif ?afak is not a writer who lives in Turkey. She now lives in London. There is an arrest warrant out for her in Turkey stemming from her book The Bastard of Istanbul. Snippets are not necessarily gospel truth. It is not always helpful and is too subjective to say that one book, or one author, is ‘better’ than another. Such a shame that one has to even consider reviews on AI-generated ChatGPT. Personally, I absolutely love and admire Elif ?afak for the woman she is, her astonishing research abilities and her spirituality and love of humanity. These are great reasons for reading any book.
Hi Suzanne, Thanks for contributing some balance and standing up for Elif Shafak here! I was disappointed in this particular book for the reasons I mentioned in the post, but I have found much to admire in her earlier work, so I’m happy that you came and shared your perspective. She is a much-loved writer, so there are clearly plenty of people who agree with you, even if not many of them have showed up in these comments yet.
A couple of points:
– I think the snippet I referred to was talking about Shafak being widely read by people in Turkey, not saying that she lives in Turkey.
– The ChatGPT comment was just a bit of fun in response to another commenter talking about living in an AI world. Of course you’re right: AI reviews shouldn’t be taken seriously at all.
– Comparing writers and books is certainly a subjective exercise, but I don’t think that means we shouldn’t do it, any more than we should stop talking about which movies we prefer or which actors or singers we think are better than others. We’ll always disagree, but isn’t that part of the fun?