Review of Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, 2024 Booker Prize Winner
I just finished reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey, the book that won the Booker Prize for 2024. The setting for this book is onboard the International Space Station is the space of one 24-hour period. Through the eyes and minds of the six astronauts and cosmonauts, we learn what it’s like inside their heads and out, being in such an enclosed environment so unlike living on Earth. We go with them 16 times around the Earth, experiencing sunrises and sunsets, and keeping watch over a giant typhoon forming.
The book is not written like a regular novel, with conventions followed. Dialog is not written line by line, nor are quotation marks used. There’s no plot to speak of, just a trip 16 times around Earth and descriptions of what is happening down below with what is seen described to us. To me, this novel is rather like an epic poem because the language of description used is so lovely that the images flash before your mind’s eye.
The reader learns what the space station looks like and what it’s like to move about, eat, sleep. We learn what jobs each of them have while at the space station. We learn what happens to garbage or toothpaste after one brushes their teeth. It’s fascinating at the same time you are screaming inside your head that you would go crazy, literally, if you had to be enclosed in such a small place never able to go outside unless you are in a suit and tethered by a rope of sorts to the ship.You learn how the ship knows how to navigate to dodge pieces of space junk in its orbit.
We also see the thoughts and dreams of each of the astro/cosmo/nauts. We learn what they were like as children and as adults with their families.
Here is a quotation I particularly admired: “Every swirling neon or red algal bloom in the polluted, warming, overfished Atlantic is crafted in large part by the hand of politics and human choices. Every retreating or retreated or disintegrating glacier, every granite shoulder of every mountain laid newly bare by snow that has never before melted, every scorched and blazing forest or bush, every shrinking ice sheet, every burning oil spill, the discolouration of a Mexican reservoir which signals the invasion of water hyacinths feeding on untreated sewage, a distorted flood-bulged river in Sudan or Pakistan, or Bangladesh or North Dakota, or the prolonged pinking of evaporated lakes, or the Gran Chaco’s brown seepage of cattle ranch where once was rainforest, the expanding green-blue geometries of evaporation ponds where lithium is mined from the brine, or Tunisian salt flats in cloisonné pink, or the altered contour of a coastline where sea is reclaimed metre by painstaking metre and turned into land to house more and more people, or the altered contour of a coastline where land is reclaimed metre by metre by a sea that doesn’t care that there are more and more people in need of land, or a vanishing mangrove forest in Mumbai, or the hundreds of acres of greenhouses which make the entire southern tip of Spain reflective in the sun…The hand of politics is so visible from their vantage point that they don’t know how they could have missed it at first…politics sculpted and shaped and left evidence of itself everywhere. They come to see the politics of want. The politics of growing and getting, a billion extrapolations of the urge for more, that’s what they begin to see when they look down.”
While reading this, I found myself being very, very quiet, and holding my breath the way you do when something scary is happening.
Because the descriptions of each revolution are so precise and intense, I can imagine the author studying what would be seen from space as the station completed each orbit and then writing about it. She had to have read a lot and spoken with those involved in this kind of work to understand what it would be and feel like.
There is also lots to consider how we are doing harm to the planet, necessitating us leaving and going to live on the moon or further on Mars, because of our actions down here. As we see the astronauts in their day, they are seeing a team of astronauts heading to the moon on the same day.
I could see this novel being used in science classrooms to show what space life is like. It’s also a good lesson in understanding perspective.
I recommend this book.