by Eman Sadiq
This December, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will celebrate the third anniversary of its ambitious launch. High-res images of far-out star clusters and space cliffs, of cartwheel galaxies and sparkling nebulae, are a testament to both the JWST’s insane capabilities and NASA’s tireless efforts to illuminate the deepest secrets of our seemingly nebulous universe.
Reminiscent of the JWST’s lovely space photos, and a reminder of their power, is the recent winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, awarded on November 12: Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, published in November 2023.
The premise is simple enough: six astronauts—two women and four men; two Russian, one American, one Italian, one Japanese, one British—are in orbit for around nine months, and they are quite literally floating about in space, untethered to the material “world” on which they look down from outer space. New York Times book critic Joshua Ferris notes aptly that Orbital is “nearly free of plot”—nothing explosive or world-altering is occurring in the cosmos, no threat to the universe is impending and needs attention from the crew.
All the reader gets is a day-in-the-life of space-bound astronauts, a day being 16 orbits around the earth—yet that is what makes Orbital, in Ferris’s words, “ravishingly beautiful.” Harvey breathes life into her characters, and the seemingly frightening, isolating nature of orbiting the earth in a spacecraft hundreds of miles overhead becomes almost soothing. Even the astronauts’ existentialist pangs take on a softness as they gaze down on the earth: the earth, “a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing”; the earth, without which the astronauts realize they are “sailors on a ship on a deep, dark unswimmable sea.” From space, the earth appears to be heaven itself, an unbreakable “holy ghost.”
Space works its indelible magic on Harvey’s astronauts, specks as they are in the vast sea of space-time. Time and space warp and the space-goers see home not on Earth but in orbit, on the space vessel. The crew, the spacecraft, to each astronaut, becomes “a floating family.” They are everything to one another: “for this short stretch of time because they’re all there is,” and “[w]hen they get back how will they even begin to say what happened to them, who and what they were?” They experience “sudden ambushing by happiness” at times, because the crew finds that “home is an idea that has imploded—grown so big, so distended and full, that it’s caved in on itself.”
There is a circularity to life on the spacecraft and even to being in space itself— the astronauts “go nowhere but round and round with the same old thoughts going round and round with [them].” Yet even as the crew interminably orbits around the planet, looking upon the same coastlines and inlets and centers of human life, this repetitive circling is a double-edged sword, both unnerving the astronauts and bringing them to states of reverent awe.
Undoubtedly the most enduring strength of Orbital is its elegant writing and charming Woolfian prose. Nothing happens, but at the same time, everything does. Orbital’s 200-odd pages are devoted not to fleshing out a sci-fi alien invasion or even a space crew facing certain annihilation in the great cosmic unknown— it is an ode to this planet of ours. Though it is at times meandering and has no outright “plot,” Samantha Harvey’s Orbital is a beautiful tribute to not just scientific progress but also the uniqueness of Earth, this world that we call home.
