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When I took Orbital by Samantha Harvey with me to read on a train journey, Jack said, “You’ll have finished that before you get to Stockport.”

I didn’t. Yes I was distracted by the scenery, the comings and goings on the train, and by what waited for me at the end of my journey as I was going to say goodbye to my terminally ill brother, but most of all I found I had to repeatedly put the book down and try to digest what I had just read.

Weeks later, when Jack started to read it, he restricted himself to twenty minutes a day. Normally a speed reader, this was very unusual. “There’s just so much in it,” he said. “I need to take my time over it and absorb every element.

Written during successive lockdowns, Samantha Harvey said she felt that an existence of being locked in a tin can while hurtling through space held a certain resonance for people at that time. The feeling of being isolated from everyone and everything you had previously taken for granted. Spending countless hours on the Nasa website, Samantha crafted a love letter to the planet and called it ‘Orbital’.

This 2024 Booker Prize winner might only run to 136 pages but within those pages lies the entire Universe and its future. It is not, nor should it be, a quick read.

Synopsis of Orbital by Samantha Harvey

There are no intricate story lines, sub-plots or twists at play here. In fact, at times Orbital feels more like a work of non-fiction than a novel. Six people – four astronauts and two cosmonauts – are hurtling around Earth at seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour, continually spinning on their own axis, on a nine-month mission to observe, experiment and record.

Interspersed with fascinating facts about what happens to people when they spend extended periods of time without gravity, are mesmerizingly beautiful descriptions of the planet we call home, as they pass over continents, oceans and time zones.

As they travel, a typhoon begins to form over the Western Pacific and to spin westwards towards southern Asia, building in strength as it goes. Inside their H-shaped time machine, the Japanese astronaut, Chie, receives word that her mother has died.

Alone in space, so far removed from everyone they love and everything they know, the four men and two women live a surreal existence where their only focus is the blue planet around which they are continually orbiting. From their unique perspective, they observe the Earth, their thoughts constantly drawn to the lives of those billions of people below them and the symbiotic nature of the life of the planet and those who inhabit it.

We learn a little about the family each one has left behind, scattered across the continents and the social divides. We experience a God’s eye view of what’s going on around us; we are reminded of how infinitesimally small we are within that planet and on the most superficial level, of how insignificant our births, lives, and deaths are; and yet we also come to understand how critical we are to the future survival of our planet.

My Review

One of the hardest things to get my head around in Orbital, was the concept of time. The novel follows just one day in the life of these six astronauts and cosmonauts yet in the course of that day, they circle the globe sixteen times.

Sixteen sunsets, sixteen sunrises, sixteen days and sixteen nights. Keeping track of time is a constant struggle for the astronauts who have to re-learn how to negotiate their own body clocks to ensure they have regular sleep, bowel movements, all the things that are dictated by the hours of our days. The crew are constantly checking their watches, telling themselves when they wake up that it’s morning now and it’s a new day.

We learn about the minutia of how life with no gravity works, from their hanging sleeping bags and the magnetic cutlery that sticks to the table to the compulsory morning exercise to stop unused muscles from atrophying, and the coordination tests they undergo to record changes to their brain activity.

And then there’s the almost casual revealing of things that happen to the human body when it spends extended periods of time in space. Orbital is littered with fascinating facts like in microgravity arteries thicken and stiffen, the muscle of the heart weakens and shrinks. After six months in space, they will have aged five or ten years more than someone on earth. All of which begs the question: why do it?

Then Orbital hits you with another descriptor of what the crew can see as they spin and hurtle through space:

In the new morning of today’s fourth earth orbit the Saharan dust sweeps to the sea in hundred-mile ribbons. Hazy pale green shimmering sea, hazy tangerine land. This is Africa chiming with light. You can almost hear it, this light, from inside the craft. Gran Canaria’s steep radial gorges pile the island up like a sandcastle hastily built, and when the Atlas Mountains announce the end of the desert, clouds appear in the shape of a shark whose tail flips at the southern cost of Spain, whose fin tip nudges the southern Alps, whose nose will dive any moment into the Mediterranean. Albania and Montenegro are velvet soft with mountain.

You feel yourself drawn towards that desire to see so much of your planet, to get to know it so well, to see it in its purest beauty. And you get it, you understand completely why they do it.

Meanwhile, they watch the typhoon building in strength and all they can do is transmit the images back to earth to allow the meteorological offices to put out warnings. They can see what is coming, this major threat to life, and they can wish they could communicate with people they know who are in its path but they can do nothing, only watch, like an impotent deity.

Utterly absorbing from start to finish, Orbital by Samantha Harvey is a small book with a universe-sized punch. Buy or borrow it and savour it.

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