Book Review: The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak

I’ll be up front. Prior to reading this book my experience of reading Elif Shafak (two books, There are Rivers in the Sky and The Island of Missing Trees) propelled her right up near the top of my list of favourite writers. On that basis alone I was looking forward to The Forty Rules of Love. And maybe partly because my expectations were so high, I was disappointed.

The book is a dual timeline, balancing a journey of self-discovery for Ella, a middle-class liberal Jewish housewife in the States, against the historical story of the relationship between the thirteenth century Turkish poet, Rumi, and the whirling Dervish, Shams of Tabriz. I’m always a bit sceptical of this format, though normally Shafak does it well. Too often I find that one strand outweighs the other and so it proved in this case. Ella’s storyline felt dull to me and a faint echo of the historical story, rather than offering any kind of enrichment of it. I was less interested in her boredom than with the richness of what felt to me like the main story.

This, then, is a matter of historical fact in which the renowned Rumi becomes obsessed with his spiritual teacher, alienating many people along the way and inspiring many others, until events reach a tragic conclusion. Both Rumi and Shams are still quoted today and the book takes the reader through Shams’ Forty Rules of Love, showing us events through a lot of different points of view, which I liked.

So far so good, but I did find that for much of the book I was sucked into dense paragraphs and pages of philosophical exposition. The minor characters, who by and large don’t get bogged down in this kind of detail, are much the most entertaining and engaging (even the baddies). Shams comes across as alternatively too good or too bad to be true (perhaps that’s deliberate) and Rumi, the leader, seems overwhelmed by him to the point of neglecting family and friends. 

I found the religious debate and discussions o overwhelming that they were almost suffocating; too much of it felt as if I was being lectured, rather than encouraged, about a better way to live my life. When I compare that with the sparkling storytelling and clever construction of, say There Are Rivers in the Sky, I have to admit I was disappointed, and it took me a lot longer to read than I had thought. 

Just because this book isn’t as good as I expected doesn’t, of course, make it bad and I’m sure many other will people enjoy it. But for me, it’s not Shafak’s best.