'orbital' by samantha harvey
one of the most gorgeous books I've read this year
Most of my friends have at one point lived abroad. I wish I could say the same. Through them, I lived a thousand lives; foods that you can only find pale imitations of here, sights that are alien to the grey roads and buildings that I know intimately. When my friends show me photos, I hunger. I see Singapore, Australia, Japan, Korea. The Maldives, Canada. France, Germany, Austria, Syria. The weekends I spent visiting one friend (hi, Ellie!) felt like half a dream, a snatch of life bathed in golden light, red wine and giggles. The weeks I spent traipsing around Europe (hi, Sarah!) were a wonderful whistle-stop tour, brief glimpses at lives and snippets of conversations about places and people I will never know. Short of the 24 hours we spent in Berlin trying to find a pharmacy.
Some combination of a low tolerance for discomfort, a need for steadiness and a real bitchiness that comes out when I’m exhausted stops me from being excited about long-haul travel. So it was a little strange that ‘Orbital’ by Samantha Harvey1 ignited in me the uncontrollable desire to quit my job and book a one-way ticket away, go all over the world and finally see all the places I’ve only seen through phone cameras, and tread with no trepidation over the seas I’ve never crossed.
‘Orbital’ won the Booker Prize this year. In short (too short), this novel is about six astronauts on the International Space Station as they circle the Earth. It’s an exploration of being so, so human, while in a place that is actively hostile to our fragile lives. The astronauts cannot be mistaken for gods: they cry, they laugh, they play with the mice that are used for experiments on muscle wastage. They use the bathroom marked for Russian use only, they climb on the exercise bike sent up by America. They drink each other’s recycled urine: what do borders and diplomacy mean to those perpetually plummeting at seventeen thousand miles per hour. Supposedly untouched by earthly politics and petty squabbles, ‘Orbital’ grounds us immediately with the death of Chie’s—the Japanese astronaut—mother. And then, a typhoon: all six of them obsessively track a storm heading towards the Philippines, reporting on wind speeds, measurements, trajectories. Shaun, an American, can only think of a fisherman he met on his honeymoon, of his family that he sends money to periodically.
The prose is looping, mimicking the criss-crossing orbit the space station makes around Earth. It’s poetic, it’s rhythmic, it’s a rising and crashing tide. Harvey’s long, but not rambling, sentences contain some of the most beautiful imagery I’ve ever read, with observations on ourselves that are so poignant and sincere that I found myself on occasion tearing up.
The way Harvey treats Earth, finds new ways to describe the clouds scudding over the seas, the way the countries light up at night, the cross-stitch of lampposts visible from space, the textures of each continent, reflects such a deep love of our planet. Here is the white of the salt plains, there the deep dusty orange of the deserts, and now the rich greens of the rainforests that turn molten red as they burn: every biome is given equal reverence. I admit to being perpetually miserable about the aforementioned grey roads and buildings, the quiet misery of the daily commute, but perhaps what I needed was a little perspective. Home again for Christmas, I see deer and foxes all around, the deep emerald of the evergreen bay trees. I think about the purple light around the edge of the earth, the burst of sunlight as day breaks over India, Australia, now the west coast of the USA. Every dawn Harvey describes—and there are a lot of them in the book—feels special. Light is another character in the novel, gliding over the globe as the astronauts watch, outside its regimented crawl: here is lunch time in Germany, here is evening in Kyrgystan, here is morning in Peru. It makes your head spin to think about it, and even the space-hardened astronauts feel it. They are in a timeless, revolving space, night and day and night again. They have a routine they cling to, but there is no one sunrise or sunset to anchor them. But certain sights still them, reduce them down to a quiet moment. When the six of them look out at the Auroras, the light “ripples, spills, it’s smoke that pours across the face of the planet…the light gains edges and limbs; folds and opens”. It is quiet. All we hear is the awed silence of the humans watching, and our minds quiet in response.
This quietness echoes within the astronauts; in Anton, a Russian cosmonaut, as he thinks about his wife and their marriage. This prose isn’t verbose, isn’t hidden within reams of description. It’s simple, to the point. He imagines saying to her “Zabudem, ladno? Let’s forget it, shall we? Let’s call it a day.” In his mind, she responds “Ladno, proekhali. Let’s.” The admission, the shrinking of years of a loveless marriage down to a few syllables, the matter-of-factness, it tethers Anton, and us, to Earth, in the constantly spinning, gravity-less wonder that is his reality.
Chie’s mother is another tether; she dies and Chie is prohibited from saying goodbye, taking part in her cremation and bone-picking ceremony, is not even given the grace of finding out first. Instead the news comes from ground control, hundreds of strangers likely knowing before her. We get to meet her mother, though, lying with her on the steps of her house on her last day. We get to smell the sea air, to hear the lonely, long-lived cicada. We are there when she dies. But for Chie, this exists Somewhere Else, somewhere that might as well not be real. Our witnessing her mother’s last day is a reminder that we are the ones still on Earth. For Chie, it doesn’t have to be real yet: “It’s only when she goes back that her mother is dead”. It’s only on Earth that these things matter. But you have to return home at some point.
I suppose it’s terribly obvious to say that this book isn’t really about space. How could it be? The ISS hugs the earth, cannot break away from its seductive gravitational pull. Its fate is not to forever hang in orbit, but to crash back down to Earth, landing in the ocean to be replaced. During the novel, there is the beginnings of a moon mission: we see these astronauts on their last earth-bound morning, in passing as they leave the protective blanket of atmosphere. We hear them talking to ground control, but never on the Moon itself. ‘Orbital’ is about those earthly relationships. The wonder of space is there; of course it is. Every child dreams of its expanse, of touching the stars while we still believe they’re within reach. It remains a sight that fewer than few of us will ever see for ourselves. But the astronauts’ thoughts are not on this emptiness. Their eyes are fixed on Earth: on the typhoon, of which they keep obsessive track. On their families, dead or alive or lonely or unloved. On the land itself, on the forest fires, on the invisible borders that seem so meaningless from so high up.
In the final paragraphs, as the astronauts hang weightless in their sleep, Harvey pulls us away. She shows us the sounds of the celestial bodies, Neptune “a tide crashing onto a shore in a howling storm”, Jupiter’s Io “the metallic pulsing hum of a tuning fork”. Space is not empty, no—it has its own lights and noises and seas and storms. Then she shows us, for the last time, our home:
“a complex orchestra of sounds, an out-of-tune band practice of saws and woodwind, a spacey full-throttle distortion of engines, a speed-of-light battle between galactic tribes, a ricochet of trills from a damp rainforest morning, the opening bars of electronic trance, and behind it all a ringing sound, a sound gathered in a hollow throat. A fumbled harmony taking shape. The sound of very far-off voices coming together in a choral mass, an angelic sustained note that expands through the static. You think it’ll burst into song, the way the choral sound emerges full of intent, and this polished-bead planet sounds briefly so sweet. Its light is a choir. Its light is an ensemble of a trillion things which rally and unify for a few short moments before falling back into the rin-tin-tin and jumbled tumbling of static galactic woodwind rainforest trance of a wild and lilting world.”
I’ve got to thank Regan for telling me to read this, as well as the lovely Waterstone’s staff member who convinced me to spend money that I should have spent on my sister on this book.