Book Review: Orbital by Samantha Harvey: The 2024 Booker Prize winning novel is something of a contradiction since it’s not really a novel with a traditional plot and a protagonist. Like the live stream view from inside the International Space Station ( which the author viewed when writing it) the writing reflects the routine lives of the six astronauts and their daily tasks, plus the views of the earth below them. After yet another lyrical description of what the oceans and the continents look like from space the real interest is in the thoughts and lives of those on-board. Or rather what they did on earth or what their parents do or did in the past.
Japan’s Chie would not have been there had her grandmother taken her to market in 1945. The atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki by the US Air Force killed her, sparing Chie’s mother who was then a babe in arms. Such are the chances in life as one by one we learn the stories behind the six astronauts from Japan, the United States, Britain, Italy, and Russia -four men and two women. There’s no inter connection between them – and they don’t even fall out or argue particularly. At one point the station is filled with the smell of garlic when one of them causes his food to explode in the microwave oven. Surely they would have had a bit of row about that – but no. They may all be so mature and well-adjusted that they don’t lose their temper leading to a very bland atmosphers inside the station. But they are unified in their unlikely love of Winnie The Pooh. Or rather Winny-Puh, Porsetto, Pooh-san and Vinny-Pukh which at least makes these astronauts as ordinary as the rest of us.
They are universally spooked by what happened in the Challenger disaster – not surprising really. That horror would put most people off space – but they all overcame their fears to train to be space travellers. Or space observers since they go around the earth over and over again – 16 orbits in total and 16 chapters in the slim volume written in 2023 – which doesn’t even describe how you go to the toilet in space. We do discover that urine is recycled into drinking water and we assume poo is ejected with their trash to be burnt up in the atmosphere. We also learn that space walks include not only repairing damage from space junk bashing into the station but litter picking the bits and pieces of previous missions that float around in the heavens.
There’s quite a bit of philosophical thoughts of the author and the characters about the meaning of life, but despite concerns about global warming and natural disasters and wars there is very little about the huge pollution a rocket mission creates on take-off and the vast expense of sending humans into space when below people are starving to death or being blown up by Russian missiles in Ukraine. With no plot and with very little happening and no single protagonist it’s not a page turner despite being only 136 pages long. But as an example of beautifully crafted prose Samantha Harvey’s Orbital is an excellent piece of creative writing – if only it had gone somewhere rather than 16 times around the world.
Harry Mottram
The novel was the March choice of the Axbridge Four Season’s Book Club.