ORBITAL by Samantha Harvey — reviewed by Stella
Orbital is hypnotic. The first revelation is the language. Harvey’s languid prose takes you somewhere unknown, somewhere beautiful and beguiling but also strangely unsettling. Then you notice that time is upended, that all the rules of earth that you know but hardly consider are unpicked; —are absent. Because you, like the six people circling the earth, are transported into this whirring machine. You are in orbit. Here a day is sixteen days. A morning every ninety minutes. A space station observing the earth, watching a typhoon, lamenting the planet called home, recording what happens below and what happens within; —an endless cycle of experiments, observations, and routine. Six people morphing into one organism as their lives in this bubble of a world push them, more accurately float them, closer to each other to a place where dreams overlap and longings coincide. And where each of the six, ironically, captured by individual thoughts, and misgivings, are more alone than ever. They revel in the wonders of space; —the magnitude of the universe; —the mysticism of the moon, the awe of spacewalking, and the unfathomable future of life on other planets. They are in admiration of technology, while simultaneously in despair at what they observe on that precious planet, Earth. Yet, there is also reverence and wonder. A ballad to the small blue planet that sustains us and that holds so many things of beauty. From the space station nature is overwhelming; —the orange deserts, the great swathes of ocean, the ice of the polar caps, the beguiling southern auroras. Harvey’s imagining of Earth from space through the eyes of six humans from different nations as they observe an Earth that has few borders (the great rivers show, and the coasts of Europe are well lit) and a radiance that captures the planet as a whole as if you could hold it in your palm, also dives into the particular, the minuscule; —those moments that are individual and small in the scale of things (especially if you are orbiting in space). A grandmother at the market in Nagasaki, an astronaut making contact with a lonely woman on Earth via ham radio, a postcard given with love depicting a painting framing a question about viewpoint, the regret of a flippant answer, and the obsession with a disaster which becomes a ritual. These beautiful juxtapositions of the grand and the particular are caressed by Harvey's language and descriptive narrative. This is observation at its best. The observation of our planet, (triggered by the author’s watching of live feed from the ISS when suffering from insomnia), and the observation of humanity in all our glory and failure. Little wonder that this novel is Booker Prize shortlisted. Beguiling and breathless with a rhythm all its own, this is a small novel packed with ideas, a celebration of our planet, as well as a call to action for embracing and protecting all its wonder, natural and human.