A review of the book “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey
It won the 2024 Booker Prize, it is short (136 pages), and it has a great cover – all reasons why I was attracted to this strikingly unconventional and utterly original novel, the fifth by British writer Samantha Harvey who is a tutor on the MA course in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. It is set on the International Space Station and describes 24 hours in which the craft makes 16 orbits of the Earth – in effect, “a day every ninety minutes” – carrying four astronauts (American, British, Italian and Japanese) and two cosmonauts (both Russian), four of them men and two women.
It is a work with no plot or narrative, simply a record of the passage of time with a series of observations and reflections. Every portion of the globe is referenced and every colour of the palette is deployed. It is beautifully written with glorious language and imagery utilising a vocabulary both eclectic and extensive. One moment we have a three-page sketch of the 14 billion years of our universe and another moment there are three pages examining an enigmatic painting by Velázquez. It’s that type of book.
So, what is it about? Quite simply, it is Harvey’s love letter to our fractured and fragile planet. She writes: Without that planet there’s no life … without that earth we are all finished” and suggests that “The earth is the answer to every question”. She describes it as “a sight of such magnificence it shoots your senses apart”, “this thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness” and “an unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright”.
Harvey is in love with our planet: “Continents and countries come one after the other and the earth feels – not small, but almost endlessly connected, an epic poem of flowing verses.” She appeals to us all with the existential ecological question: “Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend?”