A review by sarahmatthews
Orbital by Samantha Harvey

reflective slow-paced

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Read in Braille

Vintage 

Pub. 2024, 137pp  

___

This Booker Prize winning novella is the story of 6 astronauts housed in the International Space Station. We follow them as they orbit the earth 16 times in one day and there’s an immediate sense of the unreality of living in space, trying to keep time straight in your mind:

“To his tally he kept on a piece of paper in his crew quarters, Roman will add the eighty-eighth line. Not to wish the time away but to try to tether it to something countable. Otherwise – otherwise the centre drifts. Space shreds time to pieces.They were told this in training: keep a tally each day when you wake, tell yourself this is the morning of a new day.”

Roman, Nell, Chine, Shaun, Anton and Pietro are from 5 countries around the world and are in close proximity but always focused on earth, either for their work or personal reflections. It takes a while to get to know them as the perspective shifts frequently, I found their inner thoughts, anxieties and back stories fascinating.

Early on, Nell is trying to reply to her brother who’s ill with flu and has written to her about how lonely he is, and that it must be nice to be experiencing everything with “her floating family” and she reflects:

“Up here, nice feels such an alien word. It’s brutal, inhuman, overwhelming, lonely, extraordinary and magnificent. There isn’t one single thing that is nice… She went to put that thought into words for her brother but it felt like she was making an argument or trying to outdo or undermine what he’d told her, so she wrote only to send love and attached a photo… She finds she often struggles for things to tell people at home, because the small things are too mundane and the rest is too astounding and there seems to be nothing in between”

I enjoyed reading most about the day-to-day routine of the astronauts; the challenge of floating around, trying to exercise, carrying out experiments, sending weather reports back to earth, having to share a tiny space with strangers you rely on to stay safe, and the sense of claustrophobia. I kept thinking how terrifying I’d find it to be stuck in a pressurised metal structure whizzing around the earth! The wonder of it all does also come across in the poetic writing and I finished the book with a renewed appreciation for the world we humans share:

“With each sunrise nothing is diminished or lost and every single one staggers them. Every single time that blade of light cracks open and the sun explodes from it, a momentary immaculate star, then spills its light like a pail upended, and floods the earth, every time night becomes day in a matter of a minute, every time the earth dips through space like a creature diving and finds another day, day after day after day… it staggers them.”

Something that really struck me was the idea that these astronauts are just lab rats themselves, all the tests and data they’re sending back to earth;  they’re guinea pigs for the ambitions of future space programmes that are looking further into space, to Mars. Terrifying really!

This is a contemplative read that I kept putting down and returning to over a few weeks. When I finished it I felt my experience was a little disjointed and I ended up downloading the audiobook and read it again over one day!