BookBrowse Reviews Orbital by Samantha Harvey

BookBrowse:

An ethereal Booker Prize–winning novel that contemplates the Earth's beauty from orbit.

Samantha Harvey sets her novel Orbital aboard the International Space Station in the near future, imagining its crew of six as they go about their tasks over a single 24-hour period. Traveling at 17,500 miles/28,000 kilometers per hour, the ISS completes its trip around the Earth sixteen times each day—once every 90 minutes. Each of the book's chapters occurs during one of these orbits. Rather than outlining the astronauts' tasks or introducing dramatic actions, the author focuses instead on their observations and contemplations of the orb they circle. The result is a lovely, lyrical work that is a wonder to read.

In an interview with The Guardian, Harvey states that during a difficult time in her life she spent thousands of hours watching the ISS livestream, which inspired her to write the novel. She states, "[It] made me want to try to do justice in words to the beauty of the Earth and how I feel about the unnerving fact of its aloneness—could I do justice to that in the way an image can?" And that, indeed, is why this novel is so extraordinary; she paints pictures that not only let readers see what she sees, but that elicit the profound emotion that a work of visual art might. She recreates her own sense of wonder and awe and pulls us into that image in a way that's unparalleled, in my reading experience. She writes, for example:

"The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour. When we're on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it."

Although six characters' thoughts are vividly portrayed, the crew merge into a single entity from the reader's standpoint, each making up part of the whole; there's little differentiation between them. The remoteness worked into the novel—few physical descriptions, no quotes, no use of "I," and many meditations reflecting the view of the crew as a whole—makes the reader feel like a distant observer. That's not to say these characters are identical; they each provide a different lens through which to view the Earth they circle. Shaun, for example, is religious while his counterpart Nell is an atheist. At one point, as Nell contemplates Shaun's certainty of a creator God, she wonders, "Is Shaun's universe just the same as hers but made with care, to a design? Hers an occurrence of nature and his an artwork? The difference seems both trivial and insurmountable."

The author's grasp of life aboard a spacecraft is also fascinating. At one point she writes about how there's an attempt at homemaking aboard the aging craft, but "its stab at cosiness is in vain, there's nothing cosy about Velcro walls and kilometres of cabling and flat buzzing light, and in the end it's neither space-age nor domestic—more subterranean bunker…" In another section she describes how astronauts often panic for a second or two upon waking because in space one can't sense one's limbs as they have no weight.

When reading, I typically highlight passages that I find especially beautiful or meaningful, but I had to abandon this technique fairly early on in this short work because I found nearly every paragraph profound. In addition, the book has no plot, no action propelling it forward, no narrative arc; it's entirely contemplative. The combination caused this to be an exceptionally slow read. Normally those features would result in my abandoning a book midway through, but in this case it only added to my reverence for the work. It's one of the few novels that I strongly feel deserves a re-reading.

At one point in Orbital Harvey writes, "Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth?...Can we not stop tyrannizing and destroying and ran-sacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend?" This dazzling novel may well help many appreciate how precious and fragile our world is.

This review first ran in the January 15, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.