BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: Orbital (Samantha Harvey, author)
Literary fiction, Booker Prize short list, space station, space travel, solar system, multi-national astronauts and cosmonauts, viewing Earth from space, teamwork, climate change, grief, passion.
BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: Orbital (Samantha Harvey, author)
The vibrant colors on the cover of this novel foretell the resplendent language within. Samantha Harvey’s prose is so lush and awe-inspiring that I struggle to refrain from over-quoting it in this review. Orbital won the 2024 Booker Prize (announced November 12) for good reason. The writing is stunning. The premise is fresh. The reflections speak to two of the most grand and pressing topics of our time–human impact on the Earth’s climate and health, and world peace. And the devices Harvey uses to convey these themes are accessible and brilliant.
Orbital is the story of the experience of six men and women, astronauts and cosmonauts, aboard a space station. The novel transpires over a single day during which the space station orbits Earth sixteen times. Traveling at 17,000 miles per hour, the space station passengers experience multiple sunrises and sunsets within a single 24 hours period. They travel in a straight line but the speed of travel, and the curve and rotation of the Earth keep them out of sync with a standard 24-hour day timeline.
The astronauts hail from the United States, Japan, England, Italy and Russia. There are two Russians. The British and Japanese astronauts are female. They are a mix of married, single, religious and agnostic, all highly trained and educated in a range of scientific specialties. Each spends 5-9 months aboard the space station, and all submit daily to health monitoring, documenting the negative impact of zero-gravity space flight on human bones, muscles, blood, brain, mental health and wellness. They all became astronauts despite these significant health consequences because they cannot be anything else, because they have a passion for space, for discovery and a burning desire or need to experience the extraordinary beauty and grace of leaving Earth.
During the course of the novel, Harvey introduces each astronaut, and gives a glimmer of the biography of each. We learn that American Shaun is a Christian and he wears a cross pendant that often floats before him; he sees no conflict between his faith and science. Chie is Japanese, overseeing a study of the effect of weightlessness on mice. During the flight she learns that her mother has died and she will not be home for the funeral. Roman and Anton are Russian cosmonauts. They harbor some mild envy of American success with moon landings, often have space and moon-based dreams, and mourn the aging of the Russian portions of the space station. They have tremendous national pride in the Russian forefathers in space travel. Pietro is an Italian biologist studying viruses and funguses in space. He also enjoys scuba diving. During the orbits the astronauts carefully track a typhoon approaching the Philippines, of particular importance to Pietro. He is concerned about the welfare of a fisherman and his family he met there. Nell, the British astronaut, was obsessed by the Challenger mission as a child of seven; the explosion of that ship forever altered her. Despite these compelling backstories, the novel is more about the collective experience aboard the space station and the lessons it yields than about any individual astronaut.
Each backstory quickly recedes as Harvey shifts focus to the collective experience of the group. There is a shared dedication to the mission of discovery. The astronauts operate with mutual respect and without political animosities. They work communally, sharing not only tight living quarters, but chores, experiments, meals, and maintenance tasks. There is immense shared awe at the views of Earth from the windows–continents with no visible borders, rivers, deserts, glaciers, mountain ranges, and vast swaths of ocean. There are countless sunrises on the horizon, lighting and darkening the continents at accelerated rates as they zoom along the curve of the Earth at 17,000 miles per hour. Clouds float and storms brew, including the massive typhoon. The “six of them drawn moth-like” in awe to view the magnificence of the aurora borealis,
“...a swathe of magenta that obscures the stars, and across the globe a shimmering hum of rolling light, of flickering, quavering, flooding light, and the depth of space is mapped in light. Here the flowing, flooding green, there the snaking blades of neon, there the vertical columns of red, there the comets blazing by, the close stars that seem to turn ....”
Harvey’s exquisite descriptions of continents, oceans and glaciers sliding by underneath them as seen through the space station’s viewing windows convey Earth’s majestic beauty:
Blue becomes mauve becomes indigo becomes black, and night-time downs southern Africa in one. Gone is the paint-splattered, ink-leached, crumpled-satin, crumbled-pastel overflowing-fruit-bowl continent of chaotic perfection, the continent of salt pans and red sedimented floodplain and the nerve networks of splaying rivers and mountains that bubble up from the plains green and velvety like mould growth. Gone is a continent and here another sheer widow’s veil of star-struck night.
Her language also reminds us of the dissonance between Earth as seen from space and life as lived on Earth:
They were warned in their training about the problem of dissonance. They were warned about what would happen with repeated exposure to this seamless earth. You will see they were told, its fullness, its absence of borders except those between land and sea. You’ll see no countries, just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war. And you’ll feel yourself pulled in two directions at once. Exhilaration, anxiety, rapture, depression, tenderness, anger, hope, despair. Because of course you know that war abounds and that borders are something that people will kill and die for. While up here there might be the small and distant rucking of land that tells of a mountain range and there might be a vein that suggests a great river, but that’s where it ends. There’s no wall or barrier-no tribes, no war or corruption of particular cause for fear ... .Before long, for all of them a desire takes hold. It’s the desire-no the need (fuelled by fervor)-to protect this huge yet tiny earth. This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. …Can humans not find peace with one another? With earth?
Harvey questions even the quest to conquer space as the hubris of man, and describes it as man’s need to assert animalistic territorial claim over the last frontier. More pointedly, by visiting space and awarding us the perspective of astronauts viewing it from afar, Harvey chastises humans’ universal failure to steward our one, precious, beautiful Earth:
Every swirling neon or red algal bloom in the polluted, warming, overfished Atlantic is crafted in large part by the hand of politics and human choices. Every retreating or retreated or disintegrating glacier, every granite shoulder of every mountain laid newly bare by snow that has never before melted, every scorched and blazing forest or bush, every shrinking ice sheet, every burning oil spill, the discolouration of a Mexican reservoir which signals the invasion of water hyacinths feeding on untreated sewage, a distorted flood-bulged river in Sudan or Pakistan or Bangladesh or North Dakota, or the prolonged pinking of evaporated lakes, or the Gran Chaco’s brown seepage of cattle ranch were once was rainforest, the expanding green-blue geometries of evaporation ponds where lithium is mined from the brine, or Tunisian salt flats in cloisonne pink, or the altered contour of a coastline where sea is reclaimed metre by painstaking metre and turned into land to house more and more people in need of land, or the altered contour of a coastline where land is reclaimed metre by metre by a sea that doesn’t care that there are more and more people in need of land, or a vanishing mangrove forest in Mumbai, or the hundreds of acres of greenhouses which make the entire southern tip of Spain reflective in the sun… . The hand of politics is so visible from their vantage point that they don’t know how they could have missed it at first.
As Orbital’s space station circles and circles again, carrying astronauts of different nations working as an almost organic, single entity, the book's poetic pleas for ecological preservation in the face of climate change and a shared desire and pulse for peace rises from the pages of this beautifully written book. Perhaps the 2024 Booker Prize award for Orbital will inspire young scientists the world over onward toward these essential shared goals.
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I need to read this book. Great review.