Henk's Reviews > Orbital

Winner of the 2024 Booker prize! 🏆🪐🚀🌎
It is easy to grow jaded about our technological progress but this book shows how incredible the lives of a select few astronauts are, experimenting in orbit around our planet, while rapidly spinning in a pattern similar to Murano glass across the continents. Unfortunately I actually fell asleep while reading this book
The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.

In a lyrical manner, and through the perspective of 6 astronauts and cosmonauts Samantha Harvey brings the wonders of the International Space Station to life. While the writing is pretty, and the concept of zooming into what space travel anno 2024 actually means is interesting on a theoretical level, I was left rather unimpressed.

Orbital is not a propulsive (pun intended) novel and I literally fell asleep one time while reading, even though I really love astronomy and space. The novel is basically plotless, focussing on reflections by the astronauts we follow for a day, and who we don't get to know overly deeply or intimately enough to really care for them. The Japanese astronaut who lost her mother is the closest I got to an emotional connection, while the astronaut who sees a typhoon and thinks of his honeymoon and how he met a fisher family in the Philippines was rather trite in my opinion. Maybe Harvey recognises this herself as well: But there are no new thoughts. They’re just old thoughts born into new moments.

Auroras, hurricanes, fjords, the Pyramids and many cities pass their portholes, but the medium of a book is maybe not the most effective manner to convey this visual splendour of our planet. The lack of gravity and the discipline to sustain a human body despite this, the packaged food and the closed up space with all time regimented to maximise observations and experiments, makes clear it is far from a glamorous life to be an astronaut. Still you can definitely see the allure of being a space tourist.

One plot line, if we can call it that way, is that in Orbital the ISS astronauts are not even the furthest away people from earth, with a Moon mission just departed from Cape Canaveral, bringing the point of expanding the human frontier further home. Finally I wanted to note that while I started this novel I was undergoing treatment for an illness and I did found that the isolation of a space station is an apt metaphor for sickness.
Still I am a bit surprised I didn't like this book more, but I am rounding up my 2.5 stars, based on the quality of the writing.
A surprising winner in my view, despite me definitely having warmed to Harvey during her shortlist readings.

Quotes:
Space shreds time to pieces.

Four inches of titanium away from death. Not just death, obliterated non-existence.

... wherever mankind goes it leaves some kind of destruction behind it, perhaps the nature of all life, to do this.

A human being was not made to stand still.

How are we writing the future of humanity?
We’re not writing anything, its writing us. We’re windblown leaves. We think we’re the wind but we’re just the leaf.

Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he’s about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach the pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything.

2024 Booker prize personal ranking, shortlisted books in bold:
1. Held (4.5*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
2. Playground (4.5*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
3. James (4*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
4. Wandering Stars (4*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
5. Headshot (3.5*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
6. The Safekeep (3.5*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
7. My Friends (3.5*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
8. Stone Yard Devotional (3.5*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
9. This Strange and Eventful History (3*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
10. Creation Lake (3*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
11. Enlightenment (3*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
12. Orbital (2.5*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
13. Wild Houses (2.5*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...