A Space Novel for Earth Lovers
I’ve never been a space guy. Earth, like Robert Frost said, seems to be “the right place for love.” While I appreciate the ambition of those of us who want to travel to Mars, I’m not attracted to the idea because I’m not desperately in love with the prospect of discovering new rocks. A total lack of flora and fauna seems un-enticing. Hence, reading a book set on the International Space Station didn’t strike me as immediately appealing. But Samantha Harvey’s Orbital is unique in that it’s a space story that launches off only to turn back to Earth, contemplating its bright, singular fact—so unlike anything we’ve yet encountered in the frigid, lifeless depths of space.
Orbital has just won the Booker Prize, yet it is a curious departure from the kind of book that has been most feted, toasted and touted in recent years. Ideology is not particularly salient in the book. There is a smidgen of climate change-related speculation and anxiety, but aside from that, the book is a High Romantic hymn to the earth, a prose poem that uses the distance provided by a journey into low orbit to contemplate the earth from a unique remove. It is something of a vibe shift, in the parlance of our time.
Orbital follows an international crew comprised of six astronauts as they orbit the earth over the course of a day and a night. There is nothing much in the way of conflict or plot, which isn’t to say that the astronauts are devoid of either anxiety or wonder. They suffer difficulties and existential concerns—for instance, one of the astronauts, Chie, is wrestling with the recent death of her mother. Another astronaut worries about a fisherman and his family he met on vacation once, as he watches an unusually large and fierce typhoon form in the Pacific and slam into the Philippines. At the same time, a new mission to the moon is taking off from Cape Canaveral, prompting the astronauts to consider the nature of their own journey, strangely separate from the earth yet bound to it, in relation to the more outward, searching quest of the lunar launch.
But, despite these external events, the book’s action is entirely internal and reflective. The earth turns beneath the space station crew like a device used for prayer, a rosary slipping through fingers. To give you a sense of Orbital’s basic attitude towards the earth, this passage works particularly well: “The earth is the answer to every question. The earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits. 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.”
The six astronauts start to seem like a single contemplative consciousness, sent into space as part of an effort to understand the earth rather than pull away from it. Harvey writes in the book’s opening pages: “Sometimes they dream the same dreams – of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses. Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.”
The book is packed with such vivid, poetic language. If you’re not here for it, you inevitably won’t like it, since narrative is not part of Orbital at all. It is a book made for an introspective mood, when you aren’t agitated or in search of distraction, but want to wonder and drift. Perhaps this is a rare mood these days, but the fact that Orbital wants to seek it out and cultivate it is entirely to its credit. Even though I earlier wrote that I’m “not a space guy,” the book brought back aspects of childhood wonder I remember feeling when seeing videos of astronauts floating in space stations or taking implausible leaps across the lunar surface. It restored something of the original romance of space travel that even I, hopelessly attached to the earth, could once access.
Even though it keeps itself within fairly secular terms, there is an undeniable spiritual atmosphere to Orbital. One of the astronauts, Shaun, is a Christian, while another, Nell, leans agnostic, and their feelings and views on the existence of God are discussed (rather than actively debated, since that would disrupt the book’s mood of reverie). There are curious hints of a semi-spiritual perspective, possibly Harvey’s own, which are intriguing while still managing to remain ambiguous. She writes, “And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe, but that it’s a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific inquiry, until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.”
That sounds like and could very well be an entirely secular statement. But what exactly is the light that comes through? Harvey doesn’t tell us. Scientists often gesture to the size of the universe as something that should make us feel our own insignificance, yet Harvey sees the ego’s insignificance as a gateway to something else, the nature of which is left tantalizingly vague. Is it God? Is it a purely secular human capacity to be selfless and loving? We’re left to sit with the questions rather than find the answers.
Harvey’s secular yet transcendent style of writing reminds me, more than anything, of the poet Wallace Stevens. Stevens, too, is naturalistic in his philosophy and his approach, but you can’t help noticing a kind of spirituality in his work. Here’s another kindred example from Orbital: “Maybe the whole nature of things is one of precariousness, of wobbling on a pinhead of being, of decentering ourselves inch by inch as we do in life, as we come to understand that the staggering extent of our own non-extent is a tumultuous and wave-tossed offering of peace.”
Peace is undoubtedly the primary emotion produced by reading Orbital and imbibing the sense of cosmic harmoniousness it offers. I can’t recall reading another book that was as much like getting into a warm bath or floating in a fluid medium. There is something amniotic about it. At the same time, while I found the novel poetic, affecting, and worthy of the Booker Prize, the perspective of a few days’ distance makes me offer a few cautious caveats. I feel that the greatest books should rattle us a little, disconcert us, grab us by the lapels a few times. While Orbital is extremely well-written, you couldn’t say that it challenges the worldview or assumptions of the average Guardian or New York Times reader. Not that that should be an obligation. But when I think of other great writers with a cosmic perspective, contemplating the eternal and the infinite (say, Melville), they make us marvel, but they also make us shudder. It is hard to ask or wish for Orbital to be something other than it is, given the thorough and beautiful quality of its composition—but a salutary shudder, the note of an existential challenge, might not have hurt. It would be worth the risk. Yet, in our politically fraught time, writing a non-ideological, High Romantic, and contemplative book actually is a risk, and one can’t help being glad that Harvey took it.
Sam Buntz writes from Chicago. He is the author of The Great American Cougar Hunt and The God of Smoke and Mirrors, both available on Amazon. You can find him on Twitter @SamBuntz.
