Harvey, Samantha  ORBITAL

Six multi-national astronauts, some men, some women, are aboard the International Space Station. They swoop around the Earth at 17,000 miles an hour and experience 16 sunrises and sunsets in one 24-hour Earth day. We hear bits and pieces of their lives, meet their families, share their ambitions and dreams, hear about their food, and learn about some of their scientific experiments. The astronauts spend a lot of time taking photos out of the windows and Ms. Harvey describes what they are seeing at length, right down to the lights of various cities.  

What this all comes down to is a work of philosophical meditation on what it means to be a human being within the great unknown of the cosmos. One topic considered at length is would we have been better off sitting tight with the medieval belief that God had dropped us at the center with all things revolving around us i.e., scuttle Copernicus. Or should we charge forward to the moon and beyond with the hope of unlocking more of the universe’s secrets?  A dose of cynicism was added to the mix by noting that we sent Voyager out and desperately hoped, but heard nothing and probably never will.  We didn’t ask to be born or to inherit an earth to look after.  We are after all, alone “a piddling speck at the center of nothing.” 

To give a better idea of her prose style a longer quote might be helpful. “Without the earth we are all finished. We couldn’t survive a second without its grace, we are sailors on a ship on a deep, dark, unswimmable sea.” This was followed by the admonition that we had better start thinking about taking better care of it.

I know this novel won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2024, but I must admit I found its lush prose getting too repetitive. After the fifth recounting of a sunrise, beautiful as it was, I began to skip ahead and search for something that would produce more dramatic juice. That search was fruitless, and we ended up with an award-winning novel that doesn’t really have much of a plot in the classic sense. We have a series of events, or should we say revolutions, but no complications to create tension, thus producing no real climax or final conclusion.

I get it that her goal seems to be a lyrical meditation on both the position of humanity and the fragility of our planet, but it also defeats some of her own purpose by creating a kind of numbing word salad without the tension needed to move me at the finish.

I give it a mild 3.5