Vintage

Samantha Harvey | Orbital | Vintage | 144  pages | 9,99 GBP

Sometimes you have to step back in order to see more clearly. Generations of anthropologists, filmmakers and, of course, writers have experienced this, and it is also true of Samantha Harvey's 'Orbital'- just 144 pages long in the English original and winner of the 2024 Booker Prize. The novel follows a group of astronauts orbiting the Earth in a space station, while a spaceship is about to land on the moon.  We are not therefore in our immediate present, nor are we in a dystopian future, as in Gabriela Cowperthwaite's science fiction thriller I.S.S., also published in 2023, in which the crew of a similar space station helplessly watch as the Earth ignites in an escalating nuclear war, the threat gradually spreading to the station itself.

In 'Orbital', everything is different. Here, too, the international crew observes an Earth under threat but everything still seems relatively in order. The potential horror arises much more from the contemplative reflections of the crew, arising with each new orbit as they observe storms, cities and continents. These thoughts are always philosophical in character, for example when the crew feels transformed, due to the distance, into aliens who, on their imminent return to Earth, will have to learn to understand a world gone mad. However, such sobering thoughts are always interrupted by lyrical passages - sentences that describe an Earth that appears, seen from space, like a sky - a sky that melts into colours of such brilliance that their explosive power alone is enough to spread the hope needed to want life to continue.

As with Stanslaw Lem and his legendary stories about Commander Pirx, Samantha Harvey's astronauts are also solitary beings adrift in a cold and lonely space, with no sign or hope of other worlds or life forms.

"And so, in loneliness and curiosity and hope, humanity looks outwards and thinks they might be on Mars perhaps, the others, and sends out probes. But Mars appears to be a frozen desert of cracks and craters, so maybe in that case they're in the neighbouring solar system, or the neighbouring galaxy, or the one after that."

The only real hope - not unlike with Lem - is man, and in Harvey's case in particular, Earth itself, which Lem had long since forgotten; a homelessness that encourages him to shape, from his encounters with nothingness, all the more pointed narratives about humankind and their wrongs, almost finding a kind of raison d'être for man.

This would also explain why Harvey eschews a conventional narrative, constantly giving the impression that her novel is a vast 'epic in verse' - verse that, though contemplative and observational, always has a cautionary edge. For if we are indeed alone, it is all the more important to preserve that which offers us protection as a species - Earth. These thoughts are not new; they recall the hippie aspirations of the late 1960s and early 1970s for a different and better world, which found expression in holistic ideas such as the Gaia hypothesis.

Harvey's astronauts also recognise the organic and universal dimension of the gaze on Earth, a view and a conjecture that is of course all the more essential in the face of the destructive populism of our present. In the meditative reading of Harvey's prose, certain flights of fancy suddenly make sense, such as sending every politician to the I.S.S. for a few days, for them to see what can perhaps only be recognised from afar.

One could, however, reproach this quiet, searching book for sometimes taking the easy path. It is true that each crew member has his or her own characteristics, such as Chie's conflicted relationship with her recently deceased mother, sobering clarifications in a love relationship, or a chance radio communication with a woman on Earth whose husband has just died and who was, by pure chance, able to contact one of the astronauts with her radio. However, the characters are essentially interchangeable, none of the people on board the station are brought to real life, their thoughts float from one to the next until they merge into a kind of collective subconscious. With equally floating descriptions, often running for pages, of the geostrategic features they pass over, an almost mantra-like longing for redemption can arise in the reader.

But Harvey also ensures this as the book closes, making it soberingly clear in her reserved way that the past is followed by the future, then the past again, then the future, and so on - meaning the now is eternal and as such can never be truly present. However, the fact that history since the Big Bang is simply endless repetition does not mean that it is not worth living for. Especially when what we live with and on is so beautiful that we constantly forget it:

"And now the cities on the Gulf of Oman pass by, dazzled by the dawn. Pink mountains, lavender desert, and before us Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and a foreboding curve of faint clouds that is the moon."