I have some reservations, but first, some reassurances: this review is not going to claim that Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, the 2024 Booker Prize Winner, is a work without merit. She really does manage to capture a remarkable synthesis of the galactic and the mundane. She excels in beautiful descriptions of our humble and yet majestic Blue Marble, rotating under the orbit of six ISS astronauts whose lives form the novel’s bedrock. Her book cleverly intersperses snippets of her astronauts’ personal and professional (read remarkable) lives: their hopes and fears, their atrophying bodies, and the hope with which they pursue their duties.
Moreover, the fragility of the Earth as seen from the observation window speaks to our vulnerability in the age of climate breakdown. A typhoon is moving across the Pacific and the Philippines look like specks when you’re 400 kilometres above sea level. Yet we don’t float away into abstract grandstanding – NASA and the European Space Agency appear in the acknowledgements, which is unsurprising since we’re also offered a very material picture of life without gravity. Think velcro, swallowing toothpaste, and sinus problems.
There’s also room for political commentary, the most amusing case being the authorities’ refusal to maintain a toilet shared by astronauts of all nationalities. Harvey does, however, paint an optimistic tableau of the potential for unity at the frontier. The Russian cosmonauts are presented sympathetically, and what emerges is a sense of similarity, not difference.
What Harvey has, above all, is the courage to not shy away from what she presumably considers her central mission: the orbit. We’re not allowed to forget that the Earth is moving below, and life in space is not presented as an untethered foray so much as a constant tango between planet and satellite. Each continent rolls into view several times per day.
So far, so good. However, when I think of The Booker Prize’s criteria of being awarded to the best “work of long-form fiction”, Orbital’s ennoblement certainly raises some interesting questions about what it means to be a novel, and a great novel at that. It is my contention that Orbital is at its heart an extended work of prose poetry. Descriptions abound of the Earth viewed from afar, but there is a distinct lack of jet propulsion as far as narrative thrust is concerned. The characters feel under-developed, and are really just vehicles for the fragmented reflections which provide some human drama.
Think of the great story arcs of some of the previous Booker winners. Does Orbital really stand alongside Wolf Hall, say, in its depth of character, its woven narrative? Maybe we just don’t think these are essential ingredients of truly great novels, but they surely make for a more compelling reading experience. There is nothing wrong with novels whose narrative strand is oblique. One of my favourites is Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, precisely because while it might seem like nothing has happened, everything has happened.
Which brings me to something else which has intrigued me greatly: discussion of Orbital’s length. Some have alleged that the shortness of the novel speaks to diminishing attention spans, or at least the changing way in which we consume literature. Some student reviews claim that Harvey makes it difficult to read the book in more than one sitting, in part to give the overworked Booker judges an easier time, but also to allow us to experience a whole day with the astronauts.
I couldn’t read it in one sitting! The detail is so rich, the motifs so repetitive: the novel is a dense travelogue of space. So many sentences run like this one, from one of the final pages of the book: “Rose-flushed mountains, lavender desert, and up-ahead Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and a round of faint cloud that is the moon”. Is this good writing? Or is this a (dare I say it) over-written description? Orbital is a lesson in the fact that length has far more to do with a work’s inner layers, its characters’ interiority, and the logical progression of ideas. I will confess that it took me longer than expected to read Orbital because like the ISS, it circles back round again and again… and again. The same ideas, the same eternal mode: description.
These descriptions, of course, have great value – I hope the first part of my review has established that. But upon finishing the book, I still felt as though Harvey had done a great job of seeming to say very profound things, without actually saying that much. An interesting piece of prose poetry it certainly is. A genius novel? Perhaps not.
