Orbital ★★★★☆

This is prose doing the work plot usually does, and it mostly earns it.

There's no real plot here, just six astronauts circling the Earth on a space station, and Harvey isn't interested in giving you one. What she gives you instead is closer to a long, sustained meditation, written as poetry disguised as a novel. Six people, six different histories, all held together by nothing but orbit.

The best parts of the book are when Harvey turns her attention to Earth itself. She describes the planet as looking "like heaven" from orbit, colored with "a burst of hopeful colour," and wonders whether the astronauts who see it that way have stumbled onto something true: that maybe the people who died already are the ones who get to see it like this. It's a strange, quietly devastating idea, and it recurs in different forms throughout the book. At another point she notes that humanity itself only shows up at night from orbit, as "the light of cities," hiding in plain sight by day.

That's the real subject here. Not the space station, not the six characters individually, but distance itself, and what distance does to how you see the thing you're missing. One astronaut, Chie, has lost her father and finds that the planet below is now the only thing that gives her life meaning, because "there's no life without it." That's homesickness stretched to its most literal extreme. You have to leave the atmosphere to actually see what you're homesick for.

Harvey is less convincing when she gets political, and there's a fair amount of editorializing about human hubris and environmental damage that reads more like essay than novel. Those sections pulled me out of the trance the rest of the book puts you in.

Still, as an exercise in atmosphere and yearning, this mostly works. It's not a book you read for what happens. It's a book you read for the feeling of watching your own planet from somewhere you can never go back to easily.

PS: I found myself thinking about people I've lost more while reading this than most books that are actually about loss..

Edition Read

• Author: Samantha Harvey
• Date Published: 2023-11-02
• Pages: 207

Description

A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day. Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?

Source: Hardcover

Notable Highlights

Chie has been made an orphan, her father dead a decade. That ball is the only thing she can point to now that has given her life. There’s no life without it. Without that planet there’s no life. Obvious. [loc. 155]

The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour. When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it. [loc. 163]

From the space station’s distance mankind is a creature that comes out only at night. Mankind is the light of cities and the illuminated filament of roads. By day, it’s gone. It hides in plain sight. [loc. 230]

She finds she often struggles for things to tell people at home, because the small things are too mundane and the rest is too astounding and there seems to be nothing in between, none of the usual gossip, the he-said-she-said, the ups and downs; there is a lot of round and round. There’s a lot of contemplation of how it’s possible to get nowhere very fast. [loc. 288]

Maybe human civilisation is like a single life – we grow out of the royalty of childhood into supreme normality; we find out about our own unspecialness and in a flush of innocence we feel quite glad – if we’re not special then we might not be alone. [loc. 439]

And now maybe humankind is in the late smash-it-all-up teenage stage of self-harm and nihilism, because we didn’t ask to be alive, we didn’t ask to inherit an earth to look after, and we didn’t ask to be so completely unjustly darkly alone. [loc. 451]

You have a house made of tin, cardboard, hardboard and sticks, and these days the typhoons are so frequent and huge that there’s no point in building something better, it’s easier to have nothing much to lose than to keep losing something. [loc. 569]

Because who can look at man’s neurotic assault on the planet and find it beautiful? Man’s hubris. A hubris so almighty it’s matched only by his stupidity. And these phallic ships thrust into space are surely the most hubristic of them all, the totems of a species gone mad with self-love. [loc. 800]

Chie, my first and only child, that you might regard in wonder these men walking on the moon but you must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory, because humanity doesn’t know when to stop, it doesn’t know when to call it a day, so be wary is what I mean though I say nothing, be wary. [loc. 916]

When the six of them talked about their spacewalks afterwards, they described déjà vu – they knew they’d been there before. Roman said that perhaps it was caused by untapped memories of being in the womb. That’s what being floating in space feels like for me, he’d said. Being not yet born. [loc. 1043]

The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want. [loc. 1111]

In five billion years when the earth is long dead, it’ll be a love song that outlives spent suns. The sound signature of a love-flooded brain, passing through the Oort Cloud, through solar systems, past hurtling meteorites, into the gravitational pull of stars that don’t yet exist. [loc. 1307]

Once, when she was around eight years old, she wrote a list of unusual things, one item of which was female pilots. She asked her parents, her teachers, how many female pilots there were in Japan and the answer turned out to be none, in the military at least. None. And a seed was sown in a resolute mind, a methodical and fearless and crystalline mind. [loc. 1737]