“Orbital” by Samantha Harvey

Spaced out

Onboard the craft it’s Tuesday morning, four fifteen, the beginning of October. Out there it’s Argentina it’s the South Atlantic it’s Cape Town it’s Zimbabwe. Over its right shoulder the planet whispers morning – a slender molten breach of light. They slip through time zones in silence.

This 2024 Booker Prize winner is not a conventional novel, and I find it difficult to evaluate as a work of fiction. I also find it difficult to evaluate as anything else. That doesn’t make it either bad or good. Let’s take a closer look.

The cover calls this slim volume “A Novel.” It isn’t, not by any standard definition. It’s 207 pages long, which could certainly be a novel, albeit a short one. However, the maximum number of lines per page is a mere 25. Most fiction has around 30-35 lines per printed page.¹ This means the word count probably doesn’t exceed 40,000, which puts it squarely in novella territory.

But I hesitate to call it a novella. There’s almost no plot, and while there are six human characters – all of them astronauts on a space station – they don’t really do much. Perhaps it could best be designated a prose poem, but even that doesn’t feel right: while the story elements are meager, they exist, and sometimes it feels like an actual story is about to begin. However, it never does. Or maybe it’s an extended essay? But there are too many fictional elements for that.

Nothing particularly dramatic happens on the space station. As personalities, the characters are only vaguely sketched out. One has fond memories of his fisherman friend from the Philippines. One is upset because her mother, in Japan, just died and she can’t attend the funeral. One (a Russian) nurtures a Cold War-era resentment of America for getting to the moon first. That’s about as deep as it goes. Imagine the central section of 2001: A Space Odyssey without the disruptive antics of HAL the computer and you’ll get a sense of what Orbital is like. The most dramatic thing in the book is a massive typhoon traversing the Pacific, which the astronauts follow from their cosmic perch. It feels like a tacked-on structural element rather than a natural event. And since it’s happening on earth, it has no effect on our astronauts. They’re spectators, just like we the readers are.

What about the beautiful, mystical, transcendent prose that this book is praised for? Much of the time, Harvey delivers. The opening paragraph of “Orbit 4, ascending” shows off her descriptive powers:

In the new morning of today’s fourth earth orbit the Saharan dust sweeps to the sea in hundred-mile ribbons. Hazy pale green shimmering sea, hazy tangerine land. This is Africa chiming with light. You can almost hear it, this light, from inside the craft. Gran Canaria’s steep radial gorges pile the island up like a sandcastle hastily built, and when the Atlas Mountains announce the end of the desert, clouds appear in the shape of a shark whose tail flips at the southern coast of Spain, whose fin-tip nudges the southern Alps, whose nose will dive any moment into the Mediterranean. Albania and Montenegro are velvet soft with mountain.

On the downside, there is a great deal of “inventorying.” This tallying of various items of space junk, from “Orbit 16,” is characteristic:

Operating satellites, ex-satellites blown into pieces, natural satellites, flecks of paint, frozen engine coolant, the upper stages of rockets, bits of Sputnik 1 and Iridium 33 and Kosmos 2251, solid-rocket exhaust particles, a lost toolbag, a mislaid camera, a dropped pair of pliers and a pair of gloves.

This isn’t a bad thing in itself – hell, I like to do it in my own writing sometimes! – but the problem is that such lists occur every few pages on average. In some cases, they’re literally lists stuck on surfaces by the astronauts, to remind them of things they miss from home. These verbal pile-ups become so frequent that their total effect resembles the depressing spectacle of a storage closet that hasn’t been cleaned out in years.

Harvey makes a lot of observations, some of them banal. If there’s a lesson she wants to teach us, it’s that the earth is the only home we have and we should cherish it and put an end to our petty squabbles, which magically vanish when viewed from space. Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather; I certainly couldn’t have come up with an insight like that by myself. More than once I was reminded of the old children’s TV show Big Blue Marble (“from space, the earth looks like a big blue marble!”).

My interest in the book began to wane at about the halfway point, around page 100. That was when it became clear that nothing new was going to happen, no big reveal was forthcoming, and we would be orbiting around a display of highly polished and sometimes self-conscious prose without much happening until the book came to an end.

You may get the impression that I disliked Orbital. I admit there was some tedium and irritation on my part. That said, I’m glad I read it. Even though it felt like an experiment that didn’t quite come off, it was a trip worth taking. Harvey tries to do something different, something cosmic in the literal sense, and if it doesn’t quite work as a novel, novella, prose poem, or whatever the hell it is, I still found it refreshing. As an exercise in trying to tell a story when you don’t have an actual story to tell, it creates a unique impression. Whether you find that compelling, or successful, is a different question.

To sum up – the Booker Prize went to a non-novel with hardly any plot, action, or characters. Is that really a bad thing, though? One of the problems with Orbital is that, given its singularity, it’s hard to evaluate it in terms of established aesthetic categories. The best comparison, I think, is with one of those big-screen IMAX spectaculars about natural wonders or space travel, like Cosmic Voyage or Grand Canyon: The Hidden Secrets. It really begs to be approached as a travelogue rather than as a work of art.

1. My own Social Distancing boasts a staggering 39 lines per page, giving it a deceptive page count of 174 (for a total of 73K words). This was the publisher’s decision, not mine.