Book Review | Orbital odyssey dull and underwhelming!

In the last quarter of the latest Booker-winner, Orbital, one of its six protagonists, American Shaun, is posed by a journalist this perplexing question: With this new era of space travel, how are we writing the future of humanity? Initially, Shaun is at a loss because, the writer says, in space your thoughts are usually about the next few moments; you learn not to think beyond the next half-hour. But when he asks his co-astronaut, Pietro, the Italian, the latter wisecracks, with the gilded pens of billionaires. Soonafter, Shaun muses that since space is the last remaining wilderness we have left, the earthly ones having all been discovered and plundered, space travel may just be, at the core of it, one more animal migration against the onslaught of ineluctable climate change.

That, then, is the genre of this work, a slender, stylised climate fiction which doubles as a meditation on the earth, universe, life and beauty, at 136 pages being the second shortest to win this coveted honour being just four pages longer than Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, of 1979, and it follows astronauts Shaun, Pietro, Roman, Anton, Nell and Chie aboard the International Space Station as they make 16 orbits around the planet in 24 hours. Each chapter of the novel covers a single 90-minute orbit. The narrative catches their experience.

The choice of the word, “orbital”, for title is interesting, because in one of its definitions it is a three-dimensional description of the most likely location of an electron around an atom and we, the reader, are always kept guessing as to the spacecraft’s exact position vis-a-vis the earth. It flies a low orbit at 250 miles above it.

Aboard the shuttle, the astronauts have their own experiments and duties. These include monitoring microbes, growing protein crystals, cabbage, thale cress and dwarf wheat, self-administering brain scans, servicing oxygen generators, observing flammability of substances in controlled environments, culturing heart cells and watching mice. In the beginning of the novel, Japanese Chie, one of the two women aboard, loses her mother. Because they are in a closed environment, when the astronauts sleep, the objects in their dreams overlap all too often. But their messages are different. The only believer on board, Shaun, receives a suggestion that God, after all, does not exist, but forgets its reasoning upon waking. The story, if it can be called such, is full of such private events.

The strength of the novel lies in its slow pace, masterly language and insight into human thought. On pp. 87-88, there is this exquisite depiction of the contemplations of a woman in love thinking simultaneously about her lover and the earth. If aliens got access to her brainwaves recorded over an EEG on a phonograph 40,000 years later, would they be able to decipher them? The long, effortlessly mesmerising sentences, using unusual words and constructions, are perfect for being recited in an audio-book and ideal to quote from to poorly educated, smart-alecky subeditors. The author’s own contribution to the lexicon is “imagineered” by which she describes astronauts having to step into the personae of Flash Gordon and Captain Marvel branded as they are under media spotlight.

The blemish in the novel is a jaw-dropping factual error on pp. 112-113 that puts Buddha’s arrival at a time ahead of the appearance of Hindu gods, bad form on the part of the author.

Samantha Harvey is known to have watched a constant livestream from the International Space Station while writing the novel, and it passes the test of authenticity, but does it move the reader? Is it profound enough, imaginative enough, controversial enough, does it fill them with tenderness or wonder? Or is it safe, clear of present-day political booby-traps?

Now that it has won the Booker Prize, this scrutiny is inevitable, and one of the functions this book serves is to quench the world’s curiosity around travelling in a spacecraft. Which, once satisfied, is a bit of an anti-climax.

What is space travel like? Peaceful. This is the somewhat underwhelming takeaway of the reader.

Orbital

By Samantha Harvey

Penguin

pp. 136; Rs 550