Review: Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Orbital, which features six astronauts on a space station, is about perception, about the idea of ‘big’ and ‘small’, ‘reality’ and ‘illusion’ and about taking a hard look at our own understanding of the world
The first thing that comes to my mind after hearing the word “space” is a spontaneous feeling of dread. Growing up in a town close to Karnal, the birthplace of Kalpana Chawla, the first Indian woman astronaut, I had felt a great sense of grief when the news of her death on Space Shuttle Columbia aired on television. Aware of the technical glitches, those on board the shuttle had attempted to repair it but it disintegrated as soon as it penetrated the Earth’s atmosphere. I often wondered about those last moments when the astronauts felt the presence of death and its inevitable approach?
Orbital by Samantha Harvey deals with the ironies of being in space. Shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Ursula K Le Guin Prize in the same year, this, her fifth novel mimics her previous ones in style and theme — using a precarious moment, whether an illness (The Wilderness) or a calamity (The Western Wind), like a developer fluid, dipped in which the photographic reality of the world suddenly lights up.
Outer space becomes just such a setting in Orbital. Six astronauts of different nationalities — Nell, Chie, Anton, Roman, Pietro, and Shaun — are sent into space. They have to click pictures, perform experiments, and collect data as their spaceship loops around Earth’s orbit. Unlike sci-fi classics like Arthur C Clarke’s 2001 Space Odessey or Rendezvous with Rama and others of the genre, Orbital doesn’t use space as an alternate home or imbue it with allegory.
Indeed, the curious thing about Orbital, which spans about 200 pages, is the lack of a substantial plot. Two incidents offer a semblance of conflict: the sudden death of Chie’s mother and an approaching typhoon along “sickly frail” Indonesia. But even they receive dispassionate, undramatic treatment. Structured around the 16 revolutions the spacecraft makes in a single earth day, the story moves fluidly, using lyrical prose and long sentences to understand the complex matrix of existence
During the astronauts’ “clean-shaven androgynous bobbing,” there are moments of sudden obliteration of their selves and a powerful sense of smallness takes over. The comprehension of their previous lives is lost as they look out at the shimmering continents in their alluring green-brown shades, the expansive blue oceans, and “the moon lying squashed and low beyond the atmosphere, not really above but across, like an equal”. Their psychological sense of being is disrupted, quite similar to the physical suspension induced by weightlessness within the spacecraft. The headiness of existing in a timeless zero-gravity zone needs to be carefully balanced and tethered to rigid, countable parameters of earthly existence. The perception of day and night becomes a chore, and so does a rigorous monitoring of their bodies swimming in microgravity ‘like lab rats.’
“To his tally kept on a piece of paper in its crew quarters, Roman will add the eighty-eighth line. Otherwise — otherwise the center shifts. Space shreds time into 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. Be clear with yourself on this matter. This is the morning of a new day.”
Another interesting dilemma is the presence — or absence — of a choice. The astronauts’ illusory control on their lives has been snatched away as strict schedules make them feel like a weight has been lifted off them, making them feel young and free and without any aches and pains. Strangely, they still feel powerless, holding their camera to capture ‘the privileged anxious view of [Earth’s] building magnificence.’
Harvey uses the enigmatic Las Meninas — a 1656 painting in the Museo del Prado in Madrid by Diego Velázquez, the leading artist of the Spanish Baroque — to dissect the dichotomy between certainty and uncertainty, reality and illusion, art and life. Inspired by Don Quixote and the play, Life is a Dream, this painting has a king-queen, a gaggle of ladies (Las Meninas, literally, The Ladies-in-Waiting), a dog, and even the painter himself. Who is looking at whom is uncertain, as is the intention of the artist. In The Order of Things (1966), Michael Foucault wrote that the painting illustrates signs of a new episteme through conscious artifice and visual relationships between painter, subject-model, and viewer: “The definition of the space it opens up to us... representation, freed finally from the relation that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form.”
Orbital is about perception, about zooming in and out of facts, of the idea of ‘big’ and ‘small’, ‘reality’ and ‘illusion’ and about taking a hard, unsparing look at our understanding to gauge if these concepts were ever so absolute or certain as we believe them to be. “And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s of a universe of sidelines that there is no center, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.”
There are multiple vantage points to look at these precarious lives: apart from a bird’s eye view of life thrumming on the Earth, there are other zoomed-in versions: regular emails from their families, their ‘floating family’, and experimental mice. The three groups include those wasting away like ‘plums in palms’ as if their ‘souls have collapsed’, those regularly injected to stop their muscle wasting and those genetically modified, studier and bulkier and fit for a life with gravity. Not to forget, there’s also the body of the spacecraft keeping them afloat. All this is thrown into relief by the sudden news of Chie’s mother’s death. Then there are the personal histories and memories of the astronauts — of Roman’s hero Sergei Krikalev, who was sent to the space by USSR and had to stay longer on the Mir space station because the USSR had ceased to exist, or of the photograph of the moon landing pasted on the wall of Chie’s home. All of it is dwarfed by their growing awareness of themselves and their predecessors as lab rats whose journeys will soon “look like coach excursions, and the horizons of possibility that open out at their fingers will only confirm their own smallness and briefness.”
This tackling of the narrative situated in a place that constantly revolves, making arduous notes of shifting viewpoints is Orbital’s major success. At one point, the astronauts are enamoured to see “continents runn[ing] into each other like overgrown gardens or Russia and Alaska abutting nose to nose” but soon they are exhausted by this “constant treadmill.” “It’s hard sometimes to shake the sense of those vanished continents. It sits on your back, all the life that happens there, which came and went.”
At times, the spaceship feels like protection from earthly malice; at others, it feels like a cramped space full of inactivity. Take, for example, the question that Pietro’s daughter had asked him when he was still on Earth: is progress beautiful? Pietro had answered in the affirmative and had said that progress means being alive. But being on the spaceship has made him see “man’s neurotic assaults” and wonder if progress is not a thing but a “feeling of adventure and expansion that starts in the belly and works up to the chest.” By the end, Shaun begins to wonder if Las Meninas is about the dog who is looking at the whole business of being human, laughable, and trapped in a matrix of vanities. And so, Orbital sings a pean to the magnificent idea life, asking the reader to look at it closely, accept its many variations and stark contrasts, and surrender to its exuberant forces: “To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand that is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.”
Kinshuk Gupta is the author of Yeh Dil Hai Ki Chor Darwaja, a Hindi book of LGBT short fiction, whose English translation will be published by Harper Collins in 2025.