Orbital by Samantha Harvey
| Orbital by Samantha Harvey | |
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| Category: General Fiction | |
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Reviewer: Heather Magee
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| Summary: How is it possible for a book with no plot whatsoever and very little character development to be so readable? Samantha Harvey's wordsmithery and meticulous research goes some of the way towards explaining the power of this reading experience. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 160 | Date: June 2024 |
| Publisher: Vintage | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1529922936 | |
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In 2024, Samantha Harvey won the Booker Prize for Orbital, a compact yet profound work that unfolds over a single day in the lives of a group of astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Through a narrative lens that mirrors the astronauts' orbital perspective, Harvey invites readers to see our planet in a wholly new light.
Harvey's meticulous research, drawing from NASA and ESA (as credited in the Acknowledgements), imbues the book with extraordinary astrological and scientific depth. For all its technical accuracy and the long enumerative sections of which there were too many, Harvey managed to capture a sensation of awe, fear and reverence towards the vastness of our universe.
I hesitate to call this book a novel; it may be more easily categorised as an ode or narrative poem. It would also be a mistake to categorise this work as traditional science fiction. While the themes of humanity's frailty, the tension between man and nature, and the fragile systems we impose on a vast, indifferent universe all have appeared in science fiction works, Harvey prefers the generic label of space realism to describe Orbital. True to this, there are no unlikely elements to her prose, such as aliens or intergalactic wars. There is no plot, which at times made the task of reading feel tedious, but I realised that this only served to enhance the sense of tedium that astronauts themselves must feel in the seemingly endless orbit of their distant home. Any narrative tension, too, is absent; the drama of the book stems from Earth's endless beauty and striking appearance from the unique perspectives of these astronauts, and their reactions to this.
Beyond some superficial information about their lives back home in the various countries they hail from, these characters are not fleshed out. Instead, the Earth itself acquires the status of protagonist, as it is the main focus throughout the book. Its every inch is described, it is anthropomorphised, we see it threatened by a typhoon which the astronauts track across Asia. Readers and the astronauts alike find themselves wanting to protect it, and perhaps this is Harvey's quiet but urgent flicker of light in the darkness - a warning sign in the middle of a global climate crisis.
Harvey's language is so visceral that reading itself becomes a sensory experience. When she describes the astronauts' muscles weakening in zero gravity, my own body seemed to respond with phantom fatigue. When she writes of the rush of exiting Earth's atmosphere, I could feel the adrenaline. Yet, what truly sets Orbital apart is how it extrapolates the physicality of space travel into many different perspectives- external and internal. It is a story of outward expansion and inward reflection.
The Wanderers by Meg Howrey may appeal to readers who enjoyed Orbital.
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