posted on 19 Feb 2025

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

I’ve rather got out of the habit of automatically reading the Booker Prize winner every year – mainly because I’ve come to think that some of the choices on the shortlist are, how can we say, eccentric; even wilfully obscure. I was, however, intrigued by the 2024 pick, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, which isn’t much longer than a novella and isn’t plot or storyline heavy.

In fact, having read the 140 pages, I was left wondering whether this is a ‘novel’ at all. This is more like a fictionalised meditation or philosophical meander around the nature of space, time, humanity and the way we live at one and the same time as social animals but with a fierce sense of out aloneness and individuality.

This isn’t a plot-led story – six astronauts circle the Earth in a capsule, carrying out some scientific tasks and spending a lot of time in observation of the planet below. In the time they have, inevitably they are drawn to contemplate their own lives and relationships and to speculate on bigger questions of existence.

What’s most interesting to me about the book is the fundamental dichotomy that seems to sit at its heart. These are six different people, all with very different concerns and personal motivations – even international politics rears its ugly head in the often forced separation of how the two Russian cosmonauts interact (they even have their own toilet!) – but ultimately this piece of orbiting machinery is in truth a single united entity. It knows what must be done to survive and achieve its goals and so the six become aspects of the same being, almost a single complex lifeform. 

As daring as Harvey has been in her choice of subject and setting, I have to be honest and say that I found her attempts to express the sense of awe and wonder over the nature of the Earth as seen from above a bit trying at times. A slightly breathless quasi-mysticism infuses some of the prose and whilst I can do nothing but acknowledge just how extraordinary it must be to have the perspective that these astronauts are privileged to share, I don’t need to be told that quite so often and with such a sense of pop-eyed wonder.

For all the magnificence of the word-pictures we are presented with, I’m not sure I came out of this book feeling I genuinely learned something new or engaged with ideas that I haven’t periodically mused on when considering both manned and unmanned space adventures over the years. In fact, I might even say that if you haven’t yourself pondered the meaning of human space travel and what it can tell us about humanity itself, you’ve not really been paying attention.

So, once again, I feel that this might fall into the category of an eccentric Booker selection – not a negligible book but not one I see myself returning to any time soon.

Available now in paperback – although it’s a slender book and the hardcover isn’t wildly expensive as long as you stay away from first editions.

 

Terry Potter

February 2025