Book Review :: Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Review by Kevin Brown
Orbit, Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning novel, has almost no plot, choosing a more meditative approach instead. Six astronauts and cosmonauts circle around the Earth sixteen times in the course of the day, living aboard the international space station. There is a different mission launching on that day, one that is going to the moon, implying the demise of the ISS, as humanity looks further out to space. The six reflect on that development, but most of the book is a meditation on Earth, not on space.
One of the two events that occurs in the course of the day is that one of the astronauts—Chie, from Japan—receives word that her mother has died. She has a few moments where she deals with that grief, but not much more. The other event is the build up of a typhoon on Earth, as the six take pictures of it, so meteorologists on Earth can see how it’s developing. It turns into a super-typhoon, wiping out parts of small islands, but Harvey shows little of that destruction.
Instead, there are chapters devoted to reflections on the beauty of the Earth, as well as its ordinariness. There are reflections on the absence of borders as seen from space, implying that national divisions are Earth-bound, human-created problems; however, the narrator also points out that all of the environmental changes they can observe from space are political problems, that the supposed constructs have real effects.
Harvey explores these types of tensions throughout the novel, not settling for traditional views of how humanity is nothing more than a speck in the cosmos. Instead, she writes, “We matter greatly and not at all.” The view from space reminds readers that the Earth is valuable and that we should do all we can to protect it, even though, in the broader view, it will ultimately get subsumed by some cosmic event. Orbital is a celebration of the beauty of life now, even while admitting what the future will bring.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Grove Press, December 2023. Winner of the Booker Prize 2024.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites
