The Orbital by Samantha Harvey

BOOK REVIEW

Winner of the Booker prize in 2024, Orbital by Samantha Harvey is an ever-expansive, intricate emotionally engaging novel.

The book is quite thin because the main plot revolves around a single day in the life of six astronauts on the International Space Station – Chie from Japan, Nell from the UK, Shaun from the US, Pietro from Italy, and Russians Anton and Roman.

Throughout this day, the space station orbits the Earth 16 times, and each chapter of the book details these orbits, each covering one orbit of Earth over 24 hours, and the astronauts inside experience sunrise and sunset multiple times.

The space station goes round and round, 250 miles above the Earth.

There is an unusual structure, delving into the astronauts’ lives to provide narrative thrust and emotional impact.

The book contains a lot of aerospace-related technical terms and with astronauts conducting various experiments in space in the fields of biology, chemistry, medicine and physics, there are many specialised terms in these fields as well.

If you have a strong vocabulary in these areas, the reading difficulty is manageable, but you will need to be patient.

Though they are supposed to keep their schedules in tune with a normal daily routine, they exist in a dream-like liminal space, weightless, out of time and captivated and astonished by the ringing singing lightness of the globe always in view.

There are gentle eddies of plot.

The Japanese astronaut, Chie, has just received word that her elderly mother has died, six other astronauts are currently on their way to a moon landing and a super-typhoon barrels toward the Philippines.

One of the two cosmonauts has discovered a lump on his neck.

Overall, this book is a meditation, zealously lyrical, about the profundity and precarity of our imperilled planet.

It must be difficult to write a book in which the main character is a giant rock in space.

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 the immensity of a sky vaster than even the wildest aspirations of first loves and feeling miniscule in the magnitude of the universe.

You that what may feel momentous to your life seems washed away in its enormity.

The book can feel ponderous at times, especially in the middle, but Harvey’s deliberate slowed-down time and repetitions are entirely the point.

Like the astronauts, we are forced to meditate on the notion that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it is a universe of sidelines; that there is no centre.

The book is beautifully written but dry; I would not have finished Orbital had it been any longer.

This is really a long essay as the lack of narrative structure does not call for any ending or closure or a stopping point.

Elegiac and elliptical, this slim novel is a sobering read.

Here is my favourite quote: “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”.

Julie Chessman