The recent winner of the Booker Prize, Orbital (Penguin Random House 2023) by Samantha Harvey is not your usual doorstopper of a Booker novel, but a slim, taut and focused story of six astronauts circling the earth, the narrative divided into the 16 orbits of their craft and depicting all they witness from their vantage point far above.
Orbital is a highly literary novel. There is barely anything in the way of plot – although we are diverted by a couple of key incidents. These include the death (on earth) of the mother of the Japanese astronaut, Chie, and her thoughts of grief and loss when she is as far away as physically possible from her mother’s body and funeral and Homeland. The other is the astronauts’ anxious witnessing of a huge typhoon swirling its way over the Philippines, causing a swathe of death and destruction in its wake. But otherwise, most of the novel is comprised of beautiful, evocative and atmospheric descriptions of how they each view the earth, this giant blue marble floating in space.
Along with Chie, there are two Russian cosmonauts Roman and Anton, Nell (British) and Pietro (Italian); (even in space, this divide exists between east and west, although it is comforting how well these six humans get along and care for each other despite close quarters, confinement and deprivation).
The novel contains a lot of statistics – how many pairs of underwear, how many miles away from …, how many times around the …, how many sachets of food, how many sunrises, how much bone density lost, but these are delivered in a fascinating way so that what to most of us is an abstract concept – life in a space station – becomes personal, intimate and comprehensible. The characters are all well drawn and I’m sure readers will have their favourites.
But the most beautiful aspects of this novel are the awe it inspires, the wonders it describes and the fragility of the earth it depicts. It celebrates the splendour of courage and resilience astronauts must possess, and it celebrates mankind’s endeavours and achievements on such a remarkable scale.
Much of the book is philosophical, with the astronauts often musing to themselves, or discussing with each other, literally the meaning of life, which is starkly confronting when so far above the one place we call Home. But along with the big questions, the book relishes in exploring the small problems, daily tasks and mundane dilemmas that are entirely human, whether we’re on earth or in space. In this way, Harvey captures the enormous expanse and wider questions of existence and focusses them down to accessible and relatable thoughts that are familiar to us all.
Orbital is an absolutely stunning piece of writing, depicting the natural world and our impact on it with thoughtful and beguiling prose.