Review: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Six astronauts — or, more precisely, four astronauts and two cosmonauts — spend a day orbiting Earth in the International Space Station in this gravitational novel. But 24 earth hours have little relevance in low-Earth orbit. Travelling at over 27,000 km per hour, “the Earth … curving away from the hurtling free-falling craft at the exact rate the craft was travelling, so that the two could never collide”, they see 16 sunrises and sunsets every 90 minutes. Each orbit, their view shifts westwards, and, due to the neat physics of bodies in motion, each time they cross the equator they change from day to night, night to day; day arrives with “the whip-crack of morning”, night a wall of dark they call, ominously, the Terminator. It’s October.

They’re Roman and Anton (Russian), Nell (British), Chie (Japanese), Shaun (US) and Pietro (Italian). Stints on the station are rostered; half of them are three months into a nine month shift, the other half have been there six months (not for them the weeks-long stint that became a nine-month saga. I wonder what Harvey might have made of that). They have dreams and histories and personalities. Chie’s mother has died; Pietro worries about the Filipino family who are in the path of the super-typhoon that is spiraling off the Pacific Ocean. They’re better suited to different jobs: Anton is said to be the ship’s heart, Chie its conscience, “they are a choreographing of movements and functions of the ship’s body as it enacts its perfect choreography of the planet”. They have baggage, but you have to travel light in space. The rigorous selection and training for space travel are designed to produce efficiency, harmony, composure under stress. Space travel should ideally be free of narrative tension, and so there isn’t really any in Orbital, except the feat itself.

Anton dreams of the photo taken by US astronaut Michael Collins. Moon and lunar module in the foreground, a half Earth rising in the distance, Collins is said to be the only human not in the picture. Such images provoked a renewed sense of the finiteness and fragility of the planet. Orbital can’t offer that perspective, its view of the earth filling the frame as the astronauts travel 408 km above the surface. Certainly, there is great beauty, and Harvey mostly rises to the challenge of inventing a language to convey the awe of the astronaut’s view, a fusion of physics and poetry. Auroras “lurch” at the poles, clouds “curdle”, a storm is “an engine of heat”.

Still, it’s all a bit repetitive isn’t it, going round in circles? Surveilled, constrained, measured to within an inch of their lives, the astronauts begin to seem like the plants and heart cells cultivated to investigate the effects of zero gravity. Or the mice wasting away, clinging to the wire on their cages instead of floating free (that they eventually do gain the courage to let go is a small grace note). All this science is designed to further humanity’s forays (or escape) into space. They’re “the lab rats who’ve made all things possible. They’re the specimens and the object of research,” one thinks. Another wonders:

If humans were to stay long enough in space they would eventually take on the form of something amphibious…

But unlike Pip Adam’s vision of emancipation in Audition, they’re not permitted to transform. Claustrophobia and agoraphobia, “they have both at once”, Harvey writes. Same. I began to feel dizzy and nauseous. Like the astronauts, I envied the four others who pass them on a linear passage to the moon, escaping the circularity of orbit, except that’s just another illusion, for there are always bigger orbits, orbits within orbits. The beauty and awe grow wearisome. For something as peaceful as watching the Earth pass by beneath, obscuring the conflict and ruin below, why does Orbital feel so much like a ride we can’t get off?

Gay rating: not gay.