Susan’s Bookshelves: Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Early in 2020 (good timing as it turned out) my son Felix and I went to Texas on holiday, where among other delights, we spent a wonderful day at the NASA centre in Houston. Learning about the unfathomable wonders of space, and human achievement within it, is profoundly moving and there were many lumps in our throats that day. Last month I visited the Science Museum in London with my younger two grandchildren where again, on a smaller scale, I was several times overcome with awe.
And now here’s Samantha Harvey’s 2023 novel which is shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize and is totally unlike any fiction I’ve ever read before. The setting is the International Space Station which, manned by six people, orbits the earth sixteen times a day. That means (and this had never occurred to me but it’s obvious) a continuously unfolding display of sunrises and sunsets on the earth, which is 250 miles below. If fiction is putting yourself into someone else’s place and imagining what they’re seeing and feeling then this novel is a truly extraordinary example of it.
Aboard the ISS are two Russians, one American, one Brit and one Japanese and one Italian, each on a nine month placement. It’s never clear what language they’re speaking but it’s presumably English as a lingua franca as they go about their tasks – maintaining the vehicle from within and without, servicing the lab mice and the plants, carrying out a strict exercise routine to prevent muscle loss, receiving instructions from the ground crew and receiving and sending emails to and from home where each of them has left a life. They “swim” round the capsule, hooking themselves into hanging sleeping bags at night like bats.
And all the time the profound beauty and wonder of earth is rotating beneath them. In some ways, the novel is a heartfelt hymn of praise to the glory and wonder of our richly coloured planet and a timely reminder that national boundaries and all the hostility they cause are an irrelevance. We just need to take care of our magnificent environment because who knows how long we shall have it for. Harvey’s characters marvel at the countries and continents they pass over – it’s a novel full of geography – and see, but not ruefully, how much of it is illuminated by man-made development.
At the same time, from earth is launched a new, manned Moon probe which is sending four people to land on the Moon as in 1969. “The lunar astronauts are catapulted past them in a five-billion-dollar blaze of suited-booted glory”. Each of the characters reflects on childhood memories, families and the strange ambivalence between homesickness and a wish never to be anywhere but in that weightless, quasi-religious isolation.
It’s succinct, poetic, philosophical and breath-taking at every level and has certainly given me an insight into the realities of everyday life on the ISS, where boundaries don’t matter except that, oddly, the Russians have to sleep in a separate compartment. Orbital is a veritable Everest (which you can see from the ISS, apparently) of imaginative writing since, of course, Samantha Harvey, who lives and works in the UK, has never been an astronaut. It’s an outstanding, probably at present unique, example of just how far good research, and the hotline between a novelist’s mind and a reader’s, can take you. Literally.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: About Uncle by Rebecca Gisler
