Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novella, Orbital, is one of those novels you want to keep by your side after you’ve finished it, hoping that its calm beauty and quiet provocations will stay with you just that little bit longer. And here, in this opening sentence, I am channelling the “you” voice that she slips into occasionally but so effectively throughout her novel.
I am late to this book but I have wanted to read it for a long time, so was thrilled when my reading group scheduled it for February. I had avoided reading about it – sorry all you bloggers out there – but had heard enough to know it was different, that it didn’t have a strong narrative but involved a few astronauts orbiting the earth in a spacecraft. I wanted to come at this difference with a clear mind, ready to see what I thought, uninfluenced by the opinions of others. This is my usual modus operandi, but for “different” books, I find it especially beneficial.
Now, when my reading group meets, the first thing we do, before we start the to-and-fro of discussion, is briefly share our first impressions. Mine were that it is a beautiful book about earth and a deep book about humankind, and that I loved how Harvey balanced multiple paradoxes – science versus wonder, human inventiveness versus our rapaciousness, the beauty of the planet versus its exploitation. I also commented that it is another book that pushes what a novel is. It is not one thing or another, but combines many things – nature writing or eco-literature, philosophical treatise, literary realist novel, the one-day-novel, and more, all without a strong narrative arc or major character development, though there is a story and there are characters.
So, where to start? I’d like to start halfway in with Orbit 7, but I should explain that the novel is told chronologically over a 24-hour period during which the craft (based on the International Space Station) orbits the earth 16 times. Each chapter is named for an orbit, or part of an orbit, as in “Orbit 7” or “Orbit 3, descending”. We start with “Orbit minus 1” which sets the scene. It is early Tuesday morning in early October, and there are six astronauts on board, “nothing unusual about this anymore, routine astronauts in earth’s backyard”. Routine perhaps, but the chapter ends by telling us that they will return to earth “full of stories and rapture and longing” albeit “their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner”. Immediately, this sets up the push-pull nature of this remarkable book.
Over the next 6 orbits we are introduced to the six astronauts/cosmonauts – Roman and Anton (Russians), Nell (English), Chie (Japanese), Shaun (American), Pietro (Italian) – and to some of the “events” that loosely frame the novel, a typhoon building over the Philippines, Chie’s mother’s death, and the launch of the first lunar expedition in decades. We are also introduced to life on board the spaceship, to something about the astronauts’ personalities and their roles on board, and to how microgravity affects the body. And, through Harvey’s glorious prose, we feel the magic and awe of being in space and see the gorgeousness of the earth:
this thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness … An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright (“Orbit 7).
This thing, with sights like the auroras,
the flexing, morphing green and red of the auroras which snake around the inside of the atmosphere fretful and magnificent like something trapped (Orbit 4, ascending).
But …
“humanity doesn’t know when to stop”
This is a novel that accommodates paradox. Alongside beauty and wonder, we are early introduced to other thoughts and perspectives. In the second chapter, “Orbit 1, ascending”, the idea of perspective is introduced through a postcard Shaun has depicting Velázquez’s “Las Meninas“, a painting which poses more questions than it answers about who is looking, who is being looked at, what is the subject, is there a subject, what is real and what is not. (This is one of a few images referenced in the novel that stimulate questions about perspective, that encourage us to see things from different angles.) By “Orbit 4, ascending”, this question has developed into a recognition that their view is “half-mast”, that we are not at the centre of it all. The thinking is existential:
we grow out of the royalty of childhood into supreme normality; we find out about our own unspecialness and in a flash of innocence we feel quite glad – if we’re not special then we might not be alone … And so, in loneliness and curiosity and hope humanity looks outwards.
By “Orbit 5, descending” through to “Orbit 7″, we are around halfway through the novel, and Harvey moves us on to thinking about the other side of the equation, which is not how humans feel but what we do. The push-pull tension between wonder and destruction, between the potential power of curiosity and the more negative “force of human want”, comes to the fore. Chie’s mother, who was born because her mother survived Nagasaki, tells her daughter “be afraid my child at what humans can do; you must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory, because humanity doesn’t know when to stop …” (Orbit 5, ascending).
Then, two chapters later in “Orbit 7” comes this:
One day they look at the earth and they see the truth. If only politics were a pantomime … Instead they come to see that it’s not a pantomime, or it’s not just that. It’s a force so great that it has shaped every single thing on the surface of the earth that they had thought from here so human-proof.
… Every retreating or retreated or disintegrated 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 hand of politics is so visible from their vantage point that they don’t know how they could have missed it at first.
And there we have it, “the hand of politics”,”the amazing force of human want” that has “sculpted and shaped” every part of the planet. From this point on, the paradoxes – or tensions – that we had been subtly led to become more overt, but this is not a depressing novel. The book’s power and beauty lie in Harvey’s ability to inspire us with earth’s beauty while also posing, through her outsider-insider astronauts, our most pressing question: how do (or can) we harness the positive power of human wonder and curiosity without also embodying the negatives.
Ultimately, while not denying the underlying challenges, Orbital reads as a hymn to our “wild and lilting world”. We, like Harvey’s astronauts, see the news and have lived our lives – but, this does not make our hope naive (to paraphrase “Orbit 7”). Lovely.
Kimbofo and Brona have also reviewed this book.
Samantha Harvey
Orbital
Vintage, 2024 Original. pub. 2023)
136pp.
ISBN: 9781529922936
Whispering Gums 
What can I say ? – I’ve just bought it on Audible.
Oh great MR … I do hope you like it. I can imagine that, with a good reader, it could be beautiful.
I listened to the preview, and she sounded good. Here’s hoping she stays that way.
Certainly, it would appear that the text deserves it, ST !
Thank-you once again.
Surely she will … let me know.
I LOVED this book – so quietly meditative. And yes, I’ve kept my copy because it’s a book I’ll return to (that’s significant because I usually hand books on when I’ve finished them).
Thanks Kate … I’m glad you agree it’s a book to treasure and savour (and it is little isn’t it! It doesn’t take up much shelf space!)
I loved reading your thoughts on this one, Sue, it’s definitely a book that offers much to cogitate on. In reality, it shouldn’t work as there’s no real plot or narrator, yet it hangs together beautifully.
Thanks for the link back to my review.
Thanks kimbofo – and a pleasure. I enjoyed writing this one though it was hard to know where to stop as I know you realise. I guess the fact that it works just shows that there’s an alchemy to fiction (writing and/or reading) that we can’t always put a finger on, doesn’t it?
Definitely an element of alchemy all right. And a lot of it is to do with what the reader brings to the book — their life story/experience, tastes, other books they’ve read etc etc.
Yes, very true … and the more widely we read the richer that alchemical reaction becomes!
Wonderful reading your thoughts on the book, Sue. It does indeed seem to have a lot of food for thought and perspectives I hadn’t considered. I haven’t got to this so far either but must soon!
Thanks Mallika … I hope you get to it, though I can talk because I was late to the party too!
I was inspired by Kimbofo’s thoughts to read this wonderful book. There’s so much to love about it. For me it was just brilliant to use the Velásquez painting to introduce the idea of changing your perspective. What you wrote about the tension for humans between wonder and destruction and the “force of human want” that is evident captured what Samantha Harvey wrote beautifully. I appreciate thinking about this wonderful book again. I am in mourning to find myself living in a country that appears to have foregone the wonder and is focused on destruction and indulging the force of human want.
Thanks so much Charlotte. I’m glad you liked my take. And I can imagine feeling like you if I run across blog reviews of this novel in future. It feels like one I will always be interested to read people’s thoughts on.
Re-Velasquez‘s painting, I liked the fact that she references other images like MIchael Collins’ photo from the lunar landing to reinforce this issue of perspective. It was subtle but worked.
Harvey is a superb writer. I think I liked her earlier novels The Western Wind and Dear Thief even more than Orbital.
Oh thanks Laura … if you liked them more that must be astonishing. I wasn’t aware of her until this came out.
That quote about growing out of feeling special is a bit baffling to me. I mean, you feel less lonely because you’re so ordinary? It’s a really poetic sentence, but in reality, I think by the time we realize we’re not special, we’re in puberty and start to think everyone else is special and don’t realize we’re all not special. But what if we ARE all special? Isn’t that what we start to realize as adults? Now I’m going in circles.
Good questions Melanie and I’m glad you asked them because I nearly didn’t use this quote. I prevaricated quite a bit. I think when she is saying “we”, she is talking about”we” as in humankind – a sort of universal existentialism – rather than we as individuals. I think she is talking about the sense of feeling we are special because we are the only living beings so are all supreme, but then realising we are not so special. We are not so together about it all. And if we are not so special, maybe we are not alone, maybe we are not the only ones around struggling to make sense of who and what we are. I think she is describing a sense that we, as a planet, are isolated and so far from anywhere else, a sort of universal or cosmic loneliness and isolation, not an individual one. So, she says, “And so, in loneliness and curiosity and hope humanity looks outwards.”
This is not something I personally feel about the universe – I have enough to be concerned about in my own little patch – but I think this is what she is exploring in terms of human thought about space and things bigger than we are, about our very existence in fact?
Yeah, that’s a pretty lofty concept, to think about whether or not we’re alone in the universe. It’s definitely not one that I sit around considering.
No, me neither Melanie … but I think enough do! We have enough to wonder and worry about, closer to home, don’t we!
Right now my big thing is hoping it will rain because my car is so dusty. Come on, rain!
But then as soon as it stops you must rush out and wipe it down otherwise you just get nasty spotty watermarks. At least, that’s what you get here. Unless it’s long hard rain. Then you might be lucky!?
I don’t care about the spots, I just want to touch my door handle and NOT need a napkin because now I’m dirty.
Of fair enough … I get your point!
I agree with much of your review but for all of the beauty in it I was bored. Might have been my state of mind. It is certainly an unusual book. I just seem to get bored by anything related to space. No idea why. Are we able to control what bores us or doesn’t or is it inbred.😉🌻
Good question, Pam. I was commenting just this morning on Bill’s blog about the sorts of things that don’t interest me in reading. The interesting thing is that I’m not rivetted by space, but I didn’t feel this was, really, a book about space, but about the earth and about humanity. I was mesmerised. But, as you say, we are all different in what fascinates us.
I think it was just my mood. I could read this book in a year’s time and feel completely different. 😄🌻😄
You very well could – it’s the reader’s blight really. The wrong book at the wrong time.
I like sci-fi, and in particular books about space within that genre, but if I’m ever having trouble falling asleep, especially if unwell and restless, I can put a show on that’s set in space, and the hum in the background, meant to signify the space-y-ness of it all, puts me to sleep almost instnatly. It seems as though there might be a hum to space-fiction on-the-page that operates the same way on you, TravellinP!
(You loved this one much more than I did, WG, but I can see why it works just as you’ve described and, because I loved Harvey’s debut, I would be willing to give Orbital another try, another time. Not to convince anyone else: we’ll all got massive TBRs.)
Thanks Marcie … I did sense from your post that you were more lukewarm whereas as you can tell I found it so big, so about the important questions confronting us, in such gorgeous language and tone. It’s one I would have thought was up your alley but maybe it’s not or maybe it was that old issue of right book for right time.
I just have never enjoyed space things. It somehow never sparks joy- lol.
I do understand …
I’m glad you liked the book so much, and I know so many people have loved it but I found it underwhelming. I did like the bits about what it is like to live on the space station and the how the Russians are separated but not really, from everyone else–Cold war politics in space! And I was also fascinated by watching the typhoon, but the rest I found a bit meh and was glad the book was so short.
Oh that is so interesting Stefanie, and thanks for sharing your response. I am surprised and I thought its posing some of those big questions – about “progress” and wonder/curiosity versus the rapaciousness/destruction that it generally ends up causing – would have been up your alley. I also think the point about space exploration moving from the hands of government to billionaires is a relevant one. As for the typhoon, that was interesting to me to a point but more as a sideline!
I love how we “know” our reading friends, and think we know what they will like but we never get it perfectly right! I think about this in my reading group. I think I’ll know who won’t (or will) like a certain book but I often get it wrong. A memorable one for me was H is for hawk. Many of my group didn’t like it, and yet I expected its beautiful nature writing would have been up their alley. Many did like that but couldn’t get past the self-centredness of her grief that didn’t recognise her mum as, essentially, the chief mourner. You just never can tell!
I was surprised I didn’t like it much too! It seemed like I should, which added even more to my disappointment. I really wanted to like it, but it just didn’t connect with me. The language was lovely and dreamy but I didn’t find anything new or interesting in the philosophical musings.
The part about the typhoon that got me was not only watching it from space and reporting its development, but that one of the astronauts had family in its path and I could clearly imagine how horrible the helplessness and not knowing whether they were safe must feel.
Oh yes, I certainly thought that was effective about the typhoon. I don’t. I thought it was a very clever way of also touching on the inequality issue.
You have read way more philosophical musings than I have, so that could very well be a big point of difference. Not that I thought anything there was particularly new in those questions, but I haven’t read a lot of fiction that’s handled it. And I don’t read a lot of nonfiction much as I’d like to read more.
Also, I haven’t read H is for Hawk because I’m afraid I won’t like it even though it seems like a book I would love. I think it is because of all the fame it has gotten. There is too much glowing around it for me to be able to come to it fresh and without expectation.
I understand that Stefanie. There’s a lot I don’t read – or go see – for that reason.