s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all]'s Reviews > Orbital

** WINNER of the 2024 Booker Prize **

I’ve long been in awe of the night sky, of laying back and losing oneself beneath a sky spattered with cosmic light. There is something comforting about being pulverized by the immensity of a sky vaster than even the wildest aspirations of first loves, to feel miniscule in the magnitude of the universe and find that what may feel momentous to your life at the time seems washed away in its enormity. This sense of awe permeates every page of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital chronicling 24 hours in the lives of six people aboard an international space station as it traverses the ‘ballroom of space’ around the planet. It is a quiet novel with little to call a “plot”—no wars erupt, the station is not visited by technological failures or extraterrestrial visitors which is just as well because ‘if you’re an astronaut you’d rather not ever be news. ’ This lack of narrative tension is hardly missed in the sheer beauty of Harvey’s prose that makes it practically a ponderous poem of a novel as we orbit perspectives into each character’s reflections as they in turn orbit the Earth as ‘humans with a godly view and that’s the blessing and also the curse.’ Occasionally tedious though breathtaking in its delivery, Orbital moves through philosophical and heartfelt investigations into ideas of perspective and the wonder of our fragile existence caught up in both self-destruction and discovery spinning on a tiny, living orb in the vastness of the universe.

‘The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sights that are difficult to tell.’

Harvey’s Orbital is an achievement in packaging a long litany of human aspirations and struggles, desires and damage into the tiny window of its pages. It is less a narrative than a gaze back at the Earth along with the astronauts with a prose to harness their awestruck reverence for the planet while also a reminder to just be, to observe, to not need narrative or structure and still be able to learn from what is around us. In a recent interview with NPR, Harvey recalled collecting quotes from astronauts as a child, such as one from a Russian cosmonaut about how he never truly understood the word “round” until looking at the Earth from orbit. ‘There's a sense of one's senses and one's perception being redefined by being in space,’ she explains, ‘it's not just that things have a certain clarity, but our terms of reference are redefined,’ and the impetus for Orbital was to construct a book about observing the Earth from above in the ways nature writing looks at birds and landscapes. Perception winds its way through the book as a central theme as each character finds themselves mulling over their lives and now distant homes from orbit. Harvey gracefully ropes in the famous photograph by astronaut Michael Collins of the Apollo 11 lunar lander drifting in front of the earth and moon.

‘Every single other person currently in existence, to mankind’s knowledge,’ Harvey writes of the photograph, ‘is contained in that image; only one is missing, he who made the image.’ Such is the nature of the astronauts reflections on the planet as they weigh their own lives and achievements against the world, which Harvey best addresses through a brief discourse on Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas.

Who is the subject of the painting, the king and queen seen only in reflection, the little girl at the center, the painter staring back at the audience, or, perhaps, are we the subject simply by gazing. It is a perfect example of the philosophical and emotional states of each of these characters.

‘Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once…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.’

The nature of their stay and how ‘space shreds time to pieces’ further impacts the ideas on perspectives, such as how they are told to awake each day and definitively tell themselves it is a new day despite each 24 hour cycle making them witness to 16 sunrises and sunsets through their orbits. ‘Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters,’ and each is affected by their journey, missing home, missing the funeral of a loved one, missing family, feeling lonely even when surrounded in close quarters by their newfound ‘floating family’ although ‘in some ways they’re not really a family at all – they’re both much more and much less than that.’ It is an honor to be there, though also quite the emotionally arduous honor to bear:

‘Up here, nice feels such an alien word. It’s brutal, inhuman, overwhelming, lonely, extraordinary and magnificent. There isn’t one single thing that is nice.’

While speaking with The Guardian, Harvey mentions Virginia Woolf as a major influence (she is often compared to Woolf in the press) and while she hadn’t had The Waves in mind while writing Orbital, she now sees the parallels and ‘the way voices surface and dissipate. Of The Waves, Woolf wrote to her friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson that‘the six characters were supposed to be one,’ six facets of consciousness, and in many ways we can view Harvey’s six orbiting characters in a similar fashion. Harvey sways us through each other their thoughts as they deal with the passing of time, writing lists of of irritating or reassuring things from earth, discussing what they miss, questioning how one could see the Earth from orbit and believe in a God while another questions how one could not believe, while filtering it through with other brief perspectives such as ancient seafarers for whom the ocean was not unlike space. Not much happens beyond the pristine prose instilling you with awe, making it akin to Becky Chambers’s To Be Taught if Fortunate (though with less plot and no dramatic conclusion) and even if it feels overly long for a short novel, that acknowledgement of the lethargy puts you in the mindset of the astronauts for whom time now feels unsteady.

‘What can we do in our abandoned solitude but gaze at ourselves? Examine ourselves in endless bouts of fascinated distraction, fall in love and in hate with ourselves, make a theatre, myth and cult of ourselves. Because what else is there?’

There is a sense of hope and togetherness in Orbital which contrasts with the dread of the planet below ransacked and razed from the ‘politics of growing and getting.’ Though what use are international tensions and politics for a crew that must drink each others recycled urine regardless of nation, race or creed? Still, the terrors of violence from wars, greed, climate crisis are more are felt even if distant from space.

‘Maybe humankind is in the late smash-it-all-up teenage stage of self-harm and nihilism, because we didn’t ask to be alive, we didn’t ask to inherit an earth to look after, and we didn’t ask to be so completely and unjustly darkly alone.’

Even from above we must all confront the harsh reality that ‘wherever mankind goes it leaves some kind of destruction behind it.’ The earth is our home and ‘we couldn’t survive a second without its grace, we are sailors on a ship on a deep, dark unswimmable sea.’ Yet there is also the lingering awareness of the space station and its crew as symbolic of human achievement, of our endless striving for survival, able to carry on even once we’ve destroyed the planet. It calls to mind the poem This World is Not Conclusion from Emily Dickinson that begins:

This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond -
Invisible, as Music -
But positive, as Sound -

If anything, that is the large hope to be garnered from Orbital, though it is also the tiny hopes—the appreciation for the small lights seen from space, the awareness of loved ones amidst the landscape, the rug one will buy upon return—that add up to something greater than its parts.

‘We exist now in a fleeting bloom of life and knowing, one finger-snap of frantic being, and this is it. This summery burst of life is more bomb than bud. These fecund times are moving fast.’

A short novel that takes its time slowly orbiting your thoughts along with the crew, Orbital by Samantha Harvey is devastatingly gorgeous in its prose and profundity. Engaging in its delivery even though its sustained instillation of awe can become a bit cumbersome as a novel, Orbital puts the reader right alongside the astronauts to gaze at our planet and wonder what we would think of ourselves were we to gaze back. Moving and poetically brilliant, this was quite the lovely read that will make you feel both great and small all at once.

3.5/5

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