'Orbital' book review: Explores human and non-human life through questions of existence
Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital questions the idea of space and humans. It makes a deep dive into the blankness of understanding both human and non-human life from a refreshing gaze uncovering the questions of existence, science and politics.
Six astronauts are bobbing in a spaceship 250 miles above the Earth’s surface. All hail from different parts of the world bringing with them their unique fears, longing and hope. They are taking turns around the planet noticing a typhoon developing in the Pacific and inching towards the islands of Global South. Chie looks down at Japan and thinks about her mother who passed away a few days ago. Roman remembers the comfort of his bed as he marks his 434th day in space. Shaun recalls his schooldays that made him want to be an astronaut. Nell, Pietro and Anton wonder about their mission in human-less space. Across 135-pages, Harvey writes about the meaning of space, passage of time, and the beauty of planet earth through the characters’ personal narratives.
The book vacillates between being literary, speculative and science fiction. Harvey’s writing—the way she employs images and metaphors across a non-linear plot has the making of a literary fiction. The elegant prose makes the text immersive, particularly in the way the chapters are arranged to sync with the ascent or descent of the spaceship. The subjects of discussion are aplenty and varied: matters of home, capitalism, extraterrestrial colonisation, environmental destruction. That Harvey is a writer with a philosophy degree is evident. Philosophy, since time immemorial, has been obsessed with all things beyond human. As the astronauts take a turn of a planet that survives on competing forces of innumerable binaries, Harvey subtly asks her readers to confront the existential question of what being human is all about.
She raises her first objection over the certainty of humankind’s existence by making an allusion to Velazquez’s painting Las Meninas that French thinker Michel Foucault highlights in his text The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. ‘So what is the real subject of the painting’— the family? The viewer? Life? Or ‘is it just a painting about nothing?’ Harvey asks these questions through her astronauts as they confront the Earth to wonder if human existence is after all a matter of nothingness. In some ways, she weds phenomenology with metaphysics.
In an interview, Harvey had admitted that, in hindsight, her novel shares certain similarities with Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. She goes on to state that AS Byatt’s Still Life made her think, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and Marilynne Robinson’s Home are what make her admire the art of writing. Orbital embodies qualities from each of these texts in the way it deals with space and time, but it does it in a way none of the others do. She brings together Woolf’s structure, Byatt’s thought, and Ishiguro and Robinson’s form and style into a rare stunning symphony. And that is what makes Harvey a creative genius.
The author gives the reader much to admire and think about through her writing. But one nagging issue that persists is that the work doesn’t read like fiction. At best, Orbital is creative non-fiction on space where six astronauts are thrown in to give Harvey’s ideas the form of a story.
Regardless, Orbital is complex. It demands more from readers and thereby unsettles them. That lingering taste of the novel feels provocative and wholesome. Its entry into the Booker shortlist would only make way for more books that defy the idea of a conventional novel.
The elegant prose makes the text immersive, particularly in the way the chapters are synced with the ascent and descent of the spaceship