Orbital: a book review

A day in the life of six astronauts, bobbing around inside the International Space Station which is in orbit around earth. The spaceship orbits the Earth sixteen times in a day, during which the astronauts witness sixteen sunrises and sunsets. In fact, as Samantha Harvey describes it in this luminous novel, “the whipcrack of morning arrives every ninety minutes” and the sun is “up-down-up-down like a mechanical toy”.

The astronauts clock up time on the treadmill in order to preserve their body mass and go about their numerous chores: laboratory tasks, monitoring microbes or the growth of cabbages, tending to lab mice, endless cleaning. But they never tire of floating over to the observation windows, and their awe of our planet never dims.

There’s the first dumbfounding view of earth, a hunk of tourmaline, no a cantaloupe, an eye, lilac orange almond mauve white magenta bruised textured shellac-ed splendour.

Russian, British, Japanese, American, Italian: they each have their individual pasts and preoccupations, their different countries and cultures, but together they form a sort of whole, collective being. The two Russians go off to their “decrepit Soviet bunker”, but geopolitical divisions are hard to maintain when moving at 17,000 miles an hour. 

It is a strange, confusing existence which makes them at times question everything—is it day or night? Which era, year, decade are we in?

In order to avoid total confusion, a strict artificial order is imposed. Earth time (Earth time at take-off point?) is kept. Bedtimes, rising times, mealtimes—unconnected to the dawns and sundowns succeeding each other. Every continent, every mountain and river and desert and city, comes around again and again.

The past comes, the future, the past, the future. It’s always now, it’s never now.

The astronauts float around the gravity-free module at will. They remember their past lives, think of their loved ones, consider the future. One of them makes lists to keep things in perspective. They hate being so far from home and yet there is nowhere they’d rather be. They’re obsessed with space. The details of this unnatural existence are faithfully recorded:

When you enter your spacesuit and try to habituate yourself to the difficulty moving, the painful chafing, the unscratchable itches that might persist for hours, to the disconnection, the sensation of being buried inside something you cannot get out of, of being inside a coffin, then you think only of your next breath, which must be shallow so as not to use too much oxygen, but not too shallow, and even the breath after that is of no concern, only this one.

And meanwhile, on earth, things are going on: wars, cities sending their innumerable lights into space, an approaching tornado. Some descriptions are terrifying:

Every swirling neon or red algal bloom in the polluted, warming, overfished Atlantic is crafted in large part by the hand of politics and human choices. Every retreating or retreated or disintegrating glacier, every granite shoulder of every mountain laid newly bare by snow that has never before melted, every scorched and blazing forest or bush, every shrinking ice sheet, every burning oil spill, the discolouration of a Mexican reservoir which signals the invasion of water hyacinths feeding on untreated sewage, a distorted flood-bulged river in Sudan or Pakistan or Bangladesh or North Dakota, or the prolonged pinking of evaporated lakes, or the Gran Chaco’s brown seepage of cattle ranch where once was rainforest, the expanding green-blue geometries of evaporation ponds where lithium is mined from the brine, or Tunisian salt flats in cloisonné pink, or the altered contour of a coastline where sea is reclaimed metre by painstaking metre and turned into land to house more and more people, or the altered contour of a coastline where land is reclaimed metre by metre by a sea that doesn’t care that there are more and more people in need of land, or a vanishing mangrove forest in Mumbai, or the hundreds of acres of greenhouses which make the entire southern tip of Spain reflective in the sun.

We are given numbers too large to fit into most human brains, condensed into readability.

Some eighty million miles distant the sun is roaring.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Harvey’s book is a writing tour de force. Wonderfully imaginative, full of subtle humour and descriptions overflowing with colour and movement. If reading a book is opening a door into another world, this novel is a supreme example of it.