I had an interesting experience with this unusual novel, showing that sometimes you need to be in a right frame of mind to appreciate a book.
Orbital is a slim novel, practically a novella, set onboard the International Space Station. It chronicles a day in the lives of its crew, two Russian cosmonauts and four astronauts from Japan, Italy, United States and the UK, who complete sixteen orbits around the Earth in twenty four hours. They go on about their daily routine, clocking up hours on the treadmill to prevent muscle wastage, monitoring plants, microbes and mice, all the while observing their home planet with unabated fascination and wonder.
It becomes obvious very quickly that you’re not going to find any semblance of plot. One of the characters receives a devastating personal news, and there’s a growing existential threat of a colossal typhoon back on the surface of the Earth, but neither of these things are central. It is a novel driven largely by feelings, perceptions, musings and meditations, and your enjoyment depends entirely on whether you can tune into its lyrical style and Harvey’s (many) reverent descriptions of Earth as seen from the orbit. Put more succinctly, it’s all vibes, no plot.
I can think of a few instances when my feelings about a book were strongly influenced by the book I just finished, but I’ve rarely felt it as strongly. After the straightforward, no-nonsense style of Ted Chiang’s sci-fi short stories, I found that I simply couldn’t take in all that floaty, dreamy language in a story supposedly about the men and women of science. I could still recognise it as a beautifully written book, but I couldn’t help rolling my eyes at yet another long passage on how amazing and awe-inspiring the Earth looks from space, and thinking that real-life cosmonauts would surely never be as drippy, introspective and poetically-minded as this lot.
It hardly helped that any real character work is just as thin on the ground as the plot. Harvey does make a point of how the six occupants of the station are intertwined so intensely they form one collective being, but on the other hand she does make a concerted effort to give every character their own individual past, emotional life and personality quirks. They still come off mostly as vehicles for various philosophical points the novel wants to make, rather than people I could give a damn about.
This is where my review could have ended, but despite my general irritation with Orbital something about it clearly made an impression, because I decided to give it another go. Once I was able to be immersed in it on its own terms, rather than as a jarring contrast with my previous read, I found myself enjoying it so much more. I’m still not convinced that it has enough substance for a Booker Prize winner, but it’s undeniably a very unique and beautiful novel.
My opinion about the lackluster characters remained unchanged, and the constant name-checking of countries and continents drifting by does get tedious in the last couple of chapters. However I was far more receptive to the poetic imagining of what this strange, ephemeral life onboard a space station might feel like. I really did get a sense of awe mixed with dread, of distance and disconnect mixed with a sharpened awareness of oneness and interconnection, of how unimaginably small and transient our only home in the universe truly is.
Normally, I would only get such visceral feelings from visuals as seen in documentaries and films, so it’s impressive that Harvey could do it for me with language alone. The book is alive with exquisite imagery and many memorable observations. I particularly liked the passage about how the humanity’s presence on Earth is only revealed at night time, when we declare ourselves through the power of electricity and light up the darkness.
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