(courtesy Grove Atlantic)
Preview copy provided by NetGalley; Orbital releases 2 November 2023.
You imagine that orbiting the earth must be something akin to watching the world’s greatest, most expansive documentary unfolding before you (narrated, of course, by Sir David Attenborough because who else would work in this, or any, context?) or appreciating natural artwork so big and overwhelmingly brown, blue and green-tinged beautiful that nothing else can even touch you sensorily.
Or perhaps it’s life’s greatest out-of-body experience, an existential trip far from the humdrum surface where gravity usually holds you tight and close, and where the chance to fly free isn’t not even a possibility, making it’s availability in orbit something of a freeing wonder?
Whatever it feels like, and no doubt it can be everything from wondrously escapist to nauseatingly disruptive, there’s no doubt that the person to capture it is Samantha Harvey.
Her newest novel Orbital takes us on a journey into endless navigations of the earth where six astronauts, on board the international space station have to deal with life writ cosmically large and intimately emotional, their lives both as normal as ever in some respects and brilliantly different in ways that reshape perspective and soul in immeasurably life-changing ways.
The thing that you notice first about this gloriously affecting piece of work is how poetic it feels; every single line feel like a work of lyrical art, with Harvey’s descriptions of the planet passing underneath something of transportive beauty and observational lushness.
It’s the planet’s turning in indifferent space and the perfection of the sphere which transcends all language. It’s the black hole of the Pacific becoming a field of gold or French Polynesia dotted below, the islands like cell samples, the atolls opal lozenges …It’s Uzbekistan in an expanse of ochre and brown, the snowy mountainous beauty of Kyrgyzstan. The clean and brilliant Indian Ocean of blues untold. The apricot desert of Takla Makan traced about with the faint confluencing and parting lines of creek beds. It’s the diagonal beating path of the galaxy, an invitation in the shunning void.
In fact, if you are a geography nerd or simply someone who loves pouring over atlases with their mountain ridges and large (though sadly shrinking) swathes of forest green, you will find much to love about the descriptive passages which are everywhere in Orbital and which provide a gloriously alive canvas upon which the author tells her nuanced and emotionally intimate story of six astronauts drawn from across the globe.
These people – Roman, Nell, Shaun, Chie, Pietro and Anton – arrive in two groups but quickly become a family of sorts though Harvey is insightfully quick to point out that while they are forced together by circumstance, they have instinctual barriers to too much closeness which might prove emotionally dangerous in a place where family is far away, physically at least, and where too much self-truth might be too much to handle.
Even musical and other preferences are kept closely guarded secrets for the most part.
What unites them beside their daily chores and exercise regimen and their experimental work on a range of scientific endeavours, istheir shared sense that something remarkable is happening to them.
How can you not feel some shared sense of being and purpose when you’re staring down at the rippling mountains of the Caucuses or you’re watching, and photographing, to advance the boundaries of meteorological science, a super typhoon that is growing and growing in size, sweeping up whole countries and oceans in its remorseless race across the Pacific and Southeast Asia.
(courtesy official author site)
What makes Orbital something truly special is the way in which Harvey infuses this expansive wonder with intimacy of experience and thought so that what might appear intimidatingly big becomes accessibly and soul-soothingly small and holdable.
It’s a marvellous balance of the epic and the intimate and Harvey sustains it throughout a novel which finds a thousand ways to say the Earth is beautiful and our lives have meaning without once feeling like it’s repeating itself or being stale in its observances.
The other great gift is taking something very few of us will ever experience and making it feel both extraordinary and ordinary all at once, a tantalising mix of the routine and the unique that reinvigorates any sense we might have that life has run its course in terms of newness and novelness and that we have nothing left to truly discover.
Reading Orbital is to feel like you’re discovering the planet on which you love and the life given to you while you are on it all over again, much like the six astronauts who find themselves granted a whole new way of viewing the Earth and their lives and who are simultaneously changed and confirmed in what they already know about being alive.
Theirs is not an experience unaffected by the travails of life either with one of them grappling with the death of their mother while they are in no position to say any kind of meaningful goodbye while another worries about a friend and his family caught in the path of typhoon they are documenting.
At the beach they’d been human, a woman, a man, a wife and mother and daughter and a husband and father and son, and they’d crossed themselves, tapped their nails and bitten their kips in unconscious angst. But when they’d got to the launch they were Hollywood and sci-fi, Space Odyssey and Disney, imagineered, branded and ready. The rocket peaked in a cap of gleaming newness, and the sky was a glorious and conquerable blue.
What strikes you about Orbital, quite apart from its luminously beautiful evocations of the planet and humanity’s place upon it, is how much we need our connectedness to others.
Every page is full of each of the astronauts musing on what their loved ones might be doing right now, or thinking back to an email passage from someone they love and knowing that while their lives are wholly different to those of most other people, that it’s those very people that matter to them most.
Yes, they have launched themselves into the atmosphere without hesitation, with one of them happy to send themselves to Mars without thinking about it, and they love what they get to do, but what makes it all worth something, apart from their growing connection with each other as they orbit the earth sixteen times on various trajectories, are the people down below.
They frame and put in emotional context all that beauty and all the terror of weather events out of control and a planet of ridges and oceans and strikingly lit coastlines, and it is those people that make the wholly extraordinary feeling intimately touchingly, welcomingly ordinary.
Orbital is thus a thing of quiet, stunningly enveloping humanity; yes, the experience of orbiting the Earth is without parallel and it can be ignored or dismissed easily, with Harvey’s lucidly beautiful descriptions making that all but impossible anyway, but what anchors it all, what gives it all purpose, meaning and a sense of emotional time and place are the people we are and whom we know, and as the six astronauts race across a globe of endless night and day, that point is driven home in ways that get seared into you and cannot be quickly forgotten or lost.