MARIA GOULDING reviews Samantha Harvey’s prize winning Orbital, a novel that casts a distant eye on humanity’s smash and grab impact on planet Earth, a book of rare lyrical beauty and profound sadness that may just be what we need in these turbulent times.
We all need beauty in our lives. The six astronauts on board the International Space Station in Samantha Harvey’s Booker winning novel have busy days – two hours in the gym to combat muscle wastage and hours doing experiments into the effects of microgravity on their own bodies, plants, mice and other organisms.
What they are continuously drawn back to, however, is the beauty of planet Earth seen through the viewing window. As readers, we are given a whistle stop tour of all the wonderful features and colours of the Earth’s surface:
“… The shores of Malaysia and Indonesia where the sand, algae, coral and phytoplankton make the water luminous with a spectrum of greens… The umber plains and ochre rivers, burgundy valley of a thousand mile ridge. The Himalayas are a creeping hoar frost; Everest an indiscernible blip.”
The space station orbits Earth 16 times in a day, so during their nine-month stint the astronauts see 4,329 sunrises and the same number of sunsets. Their orbit remains the same, but because of Earth’s rotation they are in a different position above the globe each time they circle. Several times a day they see dawn breaking and darkness descending across different continents:
“Every single time that blade of light cracks open and the sun explodes from it, a momentary immaculate star, then spills its light like a pail upended, and floods the earth, every time night becomes day in a matter of a minute … it staggers them.
“Everything is dimming. The earth’s horizon, which cracked open with light at so recent a dawn, is being erased. Darkness eats at the sharpness of its line as if the earth is dissolving and the planet turns purple and appears to blur, a watercolour washing away.”
Harvey did extensive research during lockdown, and the isolation and interdependency of her six astronauts (two Russians, one Japanese, one British, one American and one Italian) echoes the way many of us felt at the time. It was a moment when ordinary life was suspended, a time of peril that gave us an unusual perspective on the world and its ways.
Perspective is a running theme. The astronauts see this apparently fragile and colourful planet amidst the enormity of the universe. There are no borders from their vantage point. Human activity during daylight is not visible but it becomes evident in the darkness of night when networks of lights illuminate cities and coastlines. This insight encourages us to see Earth as a disinterested bystander, observing the relentless human activity and our endless need for connection.
Reflective mood
Alongside the beauty there is sadness. At the beginning, the Japanese astronaut learns that her mother has died. The news casts a reflective mood over the crew as the day progresses and Chie confronts her grief and loss. Her individual experience of death and loss is echoed throughout the novel by the effects of human activity on the face of the Earth:
“Every swirling neon or red algae bloom in the polluted, warming, overfished Atlantic is crafted in large part by the hand of politics and human choices… the discolouration of a Mexican reservoir which signals the invasion of water hyacinths feeding on untreated sewage… a distorted flood bulged river in Sudan… the expanding green-blue geometries of evaporation ponds where lithium is mined from the brine.
“They come to see the politics of want. The politics of growing and getting, a billion extrapolations of the urge for more, that’s what they see when they look down. They don’t even need to look down since they, too, are part of these extrapolations, they more than anyone – on their rocket whose boosters at lift-off burn the fuel of a million cars.”
This exposure of the quest for growth and getting could not be more timely. All we hear from the current Labour government, and others around the world, is the need for growth. But there’s barely any discussion of what we mean by growth. Is it the endless production of things we don’t need just to boost employment and stimulate consumption, or is there a way of growing an economy that prioritises human wellbeing and has a sustainable environmental impact? We need to get beyond growth as an end in itself and ask, to what end?
This worship at the altar of growth is epitomised in the text by the launch of a moon mission on the day of the novel. The space station crew are envious of the headline-making moon landing – the smash and grab of a quick raid on our silvery satellite. There is nothing beautiful about this cratered rock – it gets its beauty by reflecting the sun and this beauty is only visible from Earth.
Yet the first moon landing was clearly a political act as well as a scientific triumph. Stung by the Russian’s successful launch of Yuri Gagarin into orbit around the Earth, the United States threw its all into seeing the Stars and Stripes planted firmly on the moon’s surface. Even then, the idea of conquest was eclipsed to some extent by the iconic image of our own blue and green planet, looking small, plucky and so alone in the vastness of space.
Interest in space travel has increased dramatically in recent times largely thanks to publicity about Elon Musk’s SpaceX ambitions, while a private company has just landed on the moon. Is a private company interested in satisfying the human quest for knowledge, our need to understand our place in the universe? All the talk now is of the minerals that could be mined to support our increasingly tech-driven lives.
Fanfare & glory
Harvey gives us an ambiguous view of space travel via Chie’s mother who, by a fluke, had survived Hiroshima and subsequently led a simple self-sufficient life on a smallholding. A photograph of her scowling is annotated with the words Moon Landing Day. Chie speculates: was her mother expressing wonder at where space travel might lead for her daughter, or disapproval of white American men claiming all the glory?
Or could she have been saying: “Look at these men going to the moon, be afraid my child of what humans can do… We know the fanfare and glory of the pioneering spirit and we know the wonders of the splitting of the atom.”
In contrast to those astronauts aiming to land and return from the moon in a matter of days, the space station crew are closeted in a confined space for many months. Their training has emphasised co-operation and collaboration, their only disagreements a few gentle teasings at meal times. We learn about the crew members’ personalities via mundane details of their everyday lives. These provide a vivid contrast to the enormity of the universe outside the thin shell of their home.
Harvey describes a notice on the Russian toilet forbidding the other crew members from using it. No-one takes any notice. Cultural differences remain, yet they seem laughable in the face of this joint endeavour. On the one hand, they all miss their homes and families on Earth; on the other, they don’t want the mission to end – life is so simple and predictable on the space station. They seem like brothers in arms.
Although the crew members are careful to keep their boundaries, there are some profound moments. Nell, the British astronaut, wonders how Shaun, a devout American Christian can possibly believe in a Creationist god: “She’d point out of the port and starboard windows where the darkness is endless and ferocious, where solar systems and galaxies are violently scattered… ‘Look,’ she’d say. ‘What made that but some heedless hurling beautiful force?’”
And then she imagines Shaun would look outside and say: “What made that but some heedful hurling beautiful force?”
One of my friends described Orbital as a meditation on the important questions – human progress, the fragility of life, environmental concerns – mediated through the consciousness of the six astronauts. She questions whether it is even a novel.
If you like a novel to have a narrative arc and fleshed out characters, perhaps this book is not for you. But if you are prepared for an immersive experience with much to set you thinking, this may be just what you need in these turbulent times.
Although I have stressed the novel’s political messages, Harvey does not hit you over the head with them. She leaves the reader to do the work. Indeed, one of the words critics keep repeating is “beautiful”. In my experience, it is rare for a book addressing political, philosophical or environmental concerns to be so lyrical.
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Orbital by Samantha Harvey was published by Penguin in 2024 and is available here for £9.99.
