When art goes to space, it normally goes looking for either adventure or truth. In other words, for every George Lucas or Ridley Scott, there for the thrusters and lasers, you have your Stanley Kubrick or Christopher Nolan, using the cosmic vacuum as a place to test some of our deepest terrestrial quandaries. This year’s Booker Prize winner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which dramatises a day onboard the International Space Station (ISS), 250 miles above Earth, falls decidedly in the latter tradition.
“The more and more I thought about it,” Harvey told me on 13 November, “we just don’t write about space as a lived environment. We write about it in terms of sci-fi, and it’s all very dramatic and conflict-driven and epic. And actually everything that happens daily on the ISS is the opposite of that. It’s all about trying to minimise conflict and minimise drama.”
As well as a domestic study, Orbital is a rippling epic of naturalistic description, told over a densely-packed 144 pages. The novel is told from the view of six astronauts from five different countries, working and living on the stratospheric edge over a single day. And yet within 24 hours, they circle the Earth 16 times, and at this acceleration, they achieve a state of numbing isolation as well as a near-deified view of the rest of humanity. Their perspectives at times combine into a collective consciousness. (“We are sailors on a ship on a deep, dark unswimmable sea.”) Their perceptions on the natural world and its dominant species, and Harvey’s own philosophic digressions, constitute this short, profound and meditative novel.
When we met in London less than 24 hours after the announcement of her win, Harvey was still clearly in the flush and daze of a genuinely unexpected victory. The author of five previous books and a tutor at Bath Spa University’s creative writing course, the 49-year-old has steadily accumulated critical acclaim, including one previous Booker longlisting. “I did think, the shortlist is amazing, a destination in itself,” she told me. “I would have been happy if the journey had ended there.”
Shuttled from ceremony to interview to junket with brisk PR efficiency, she nonetheless remained a model of calm, lucid intelligence, unmistakably the voice behind this book. She struggled to recall exactly which part of the novel she wrote first, or the first scene or image that came to her. But she said it came from wanting to find a new way of writing about the planet and humanity’s interaction with it. “I wanted to write about the Earth… about the natural world and our human relationship with it,” she said. “The sense of its beauty and also sorrow; and the sense of loss of innocence in the fact that we are systemically destroying it.”
The Booker isn’t the only prize this novel is nominated for; it is also in the running for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. And the observations of the astronauts and the narrator regarding the planetary surface, scarred and scorched by human activity, have lent the novel a clear topical edge. Gaby Wood, Booker chief executive, commented that “Orbital wins the prize in a year of geopolitical crisis, likely to be the warmest year in recorded history”.
“I didn’t really want the book to be overtly political,” Harvey told me. “It’s not really a book about climate change.” Its composition was bound up with a “visual idea, this painterly idea of what I was trying to portray”. A typhoon the astronauts track from space over the course of the day – the only propulsive element of an essentially plotless novel – is an attempt to articulate something subtler, about our perspective on the Earth from close and afar: “From above it is this rather beautiful shape, moving across the surface of the planet,” she said. “You can see it being pulled along the equator and then circulating around by the Earth’s rotation. It’s majestic and it’s wonderful.
“Then on the surface of the Earth, it’s terrible. Not just a weather event but an injustice, because the people who are disproportionately affected by extreme weather are the people who are probably causing it the least. I wanted a visual cue to flag up a bigger issue.”
However, Harvey is happy for Orbital to be read as a climate novel. She has only felt “more spirited” about the issue since she finished writing it. And it is a political work: around halfway through, at what feels like a structural hinge, there is something of a peroration on the forces reshaping the surface. “Every swirling neon or red algal bloom in the polluted, overfished Atlantic is crafted in large part by the hand of politics or human choices,” Harvey writes.
She told me that passage emerged from being struck by the contrast between the Earth’s apparent innocence, and the activity of mankind on its surface. “When I was looking at images of the Earth from space – spending hours and hours looking at them – it just looked like this perfect virgin planet, this beautiful glassy bead,” she said. “But then when you learn to look at a little bit more by day, you start to see how the political choices we make and the way that we live on the planet and the things that we vote for and things that we buy and things we do are sculpting the surface of the Earth.”
Space travel itself has always been a political symbol: of superpower daring, of ballistic supremacy – and, in the heyday of the ISS, of international cooperation. But, thanks to the geopolitics of the present, space today is a contested and even privatised arena. Two of the astronauts in Orbital are Russian. And though they find a deep comradeship with their crewmates, Harvey told me this was an attempt to “almost memorialise those last few years of what has been an era of peaceful cooperation between nations… symbolised by this incredible spacecraft”. Harvey notes that the ISS is planned to be “de-orbited” at the end of the decade, a crashing back to Earth poignantly foretold in the novel.
But in Orbital there is a hint of the more atavistic desires behind space travel, of astronauts as “the projections of all the sad frustrated men of America”. Harvey is wary of the age of cosmonaut-oligarch ahead. “We’re going into a future which is far more individualistic, far more corporate, and it’s going to be exploitative… It’s as if we’re no longer going to be attentive to this planet, but just try and get away from it and exploit the Moon and Mars for its resources and for private gain – not for the good of humanity at large, as much as Elon Musk might tell us it is.”
There is a good joke in the 2011 Booker Prize winner, Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, about the menagerie-poetry of Ted Hughes: “Of course, we’re all wondering what will happen when he runs out of animals.” A similar question hangs over the lyrical descriptions of the planet’s surface in Orbital: will she eventually run out of continents and landmasses, islands and archipelagos?
She doesn’t: on almost every page there is an arresting line of rich description, simultaneously de- and re-familiarising the outlines of the globe. The Marshall Islands become a “fragile tracery of sinking lands so piecemeal and storm-worn”; French Polynesia is “dotted below, the islands like cell samples, the atolls opal lozenges”. At points, Harvey enters a surreal, near-Joycean register: “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.”
Several critics have remarked upon the shadow Virginia Woolf casts over the book, comparing the collective consciousness the six astronauts achieve to The Waves. And though Harvey doesn’t cite a presiding influence over the novel, she was conscious of giving the prose a vividness and drive that would compensate for an absence of narrative incident. “There is, as many people have rightly pointed out, no plot in the book. So I was trying to find other ways of making it propulsive: different tempos, using time in different ways, compressing and stretching time, using different registers in the language, zooming in, zooming out, trying to create a kinetic energy.”
In recent years, the Booker has been dominated by baggier, more narrative-led books – family sagas and social novels such as Damon Galgut’s The Promise and Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. And though far from slight (the critic James Wood called Orbital “slim, enormous”), Harvey said, “It seems to me a different kind of book to the one that normally wins.” And yet it has already found its readership, outselling the rest of the shortlist in advance of its win. Those thousands of copies will soon be multiplied by a percentage point itself in the thousands. But for Samantha Harvey, stunned and delighted, it’s still sinking in. “Nobody is more surprised than I am to have won this prize… I feel completely confounded by it at the moment and haven’t processed it at all.”
[See also: New Statesman’s Books of the Year 2024]
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Combat Zone