Candi's Reviews > Orbital

“The mind is in a dayless freak zone, surfing earth’s hurtling horizon. Day is here, and then they see night come upon them like the shadow of a cloud racing over a wheat field. Forty-five minutes later here comes day again, stampeding across the Pacific. Nothing is what they thought it was.”

This beautifully written novel about six men and women orbiting earth for nine months confirmed how I feel daily – that conflicting sense that in the grand scheme of things, I matter not at all and also very much. If you’re looking for a space adventure filled with tension, science and action, then this book won’t satisfy you on those terms. What Samantha Harvey has penned is cerebral and contemplative. Despite the speed at which these characters orbit earth (sixteen orbits in one day), the pace of the book is quite slow. It’s a slim book that made me slow down my reading so I could reflect on my own thoughts, my own purpose. The reverence held by these astronauts and cosmonauts for the earth is palpable and sublimely illustrated through Harvey’s prose. It sometimes veers towards the sensual, which I liked.

“You could never really comprehend the stars, but the earth you could know in the way you know another person, in the way he came quite studiedly and determinedly to know his wife. With a yearning that’s hungry and selfish. He wishes to know it, inch by inch.”

We spend a small amount of time with each of these characters. We view the mundaneness of their daily orbiting lives. We learn of the effects of microgravity on their bodies, the psychological effects of viewing their home planet from above and the infinite vastness of outer space from their spacecraft windows. Their backgrounds are revealed to us. We catch glimpses of their relationships on earth, how they are coping with being away from family. We understand a bit about their relationships with one another. Harvey doesn’t preach to the reader about the existence or non-existence of a God or some higher being. She does show us, however, through a couple of her characters at least, how views differ about the idea of creation.

“She’d point out of the port and starboard windows where the darkness is endless and ferocious. Where solar systems and galaxies are violently scattered… Look, she’d say. What made that but some heedless hurling beautiful force? And he would point… and he would say: what made that but some heedful hurling beautiful force? Is that all the difference there is between their views, then – a bit of heed?... The difference seems both trivial and insurmountable.”

Despite the obvious limitations and costs, perhaps if every single person on this planet (or maybe our world leaders for a start) could be launched into space for a several month orbit of the earth, more people would come away realizing the hubris of their vanities, desires and greed. The reliance on one another for survival and companionship, despite nationalities and belief systems, might convince a few of them, at least, that this is in essence, all about humanity. Man-made borders do not exist from space, and to survive on this planet governed by the violent forces of nature, this planet that is just a minuscule part, a tiny “dot” existing within an entire universe, one might truly grasp the truth that this is not an “us versus them” scenario. We might realize this on an intellectual level, but for some reason it seems to stay in the head and not truly felt. I suppose experience is the best teacher.

“You’ll see no countries, just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, yet 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.”

I truly admired this book for the way it made me think. Not that these are completely original ideas. I’ve thought about our tiny planet in the grand scheme of things. I’ve considered my own place and purpose and usefulness plenty of times. Having this kind of reminder and absorbing the beauty of Samantha Harvey’s writing craft doesn’t hurt though. One thing I felt lacking was a fully realized connection to any of the characters. Harvey managed to convey her ideas through them effectively, yet I found them to be simply that – vehicles for these ideas. Ideas that I fully respect and agree with, but just the same I would have loved this even more had I been shown more depth of her characters. Perhaps the length of the novel had something to do with this. In only 200 pages, one can’t share the intellectual ideas and develop six main characters to the extent that I crave. That’s not a criticism but a personal preference. I still highly recommend this novel to anyone that loves to meditate about his or her place on this planet. Or anyone that thinks they are above all that – but those vain creatures won’t touch a book like this with a ten-foot pole!

“And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s of a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.”