Book: ORBITAL
Author: Samantha Harvey
Published by: Vintage
Price: Rs 550
In 1969, during the Apollo 11 mission, the astronaut, Michael Collins, took a photograph of the lunar module that brought back Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong from the Moon with the Earth and a sliver of the lunar surface visible in the background (picture). The photograph contained within it all of known life in the universe — since matter cannot be created or destroyed, all humans who came before the photograph were accounted for in the image and all those who came after it also existed inside it in some form or the other. The only person not in the photograph was Collins himself. Yet, he is present as the photographer — perhaps the most accurate embodiment of photography’s ‘god perspective’ — the one who shapes our view of all of humanity. Collins’ sense of isolation as the only person not in the image, his awe at the magnitude of looking down at the entire human race, and his wonder at the vastness of the universe are the sentiments that best describe Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, the novel has won the Booker Prize for 2024.
Harvey imagines one day in the lives of six astronauts from five countries on board the International Space Station. Although they bind themselves to earthly time through their chores and bodily routines, “[s]pace shreds time to pieces.” In the course of this one day, they see 16 sunrises and sunsets — one set with each revolution of the ISS around the Earth — and watch humanity disappear in the morning mists of the Earth, only to appear at night in the form of brilliant twinkling lights that illuminate — and demarcate — countries and continents. If this seems like the set up for a grand and fantastical work of science-fiction like Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, it is not. The extraordinariness of the setting is in direct contrast to the seeming ordinariness of life inside the ISS — the astronauts exercise to ensure their muscles do not turn to jelly, they experiment, eat, breathe each other’s recycled air, and have blocked sinuses.
The relative mundaneness of life inside the ISS and the scale of the universe around the little blue dot we call home lend to the novel a meditative quality, allowing both the characters and the readers to ponder deeper, existential questions: is there a god? Can science and religion coexist? How long can humanity survive if it continues its destructive ways? With a looping narrative pattern where each 90-minute orbit seems like a new beginning and, yet, induces a sense of déjà vu, Harvey untethers readers from the measurability of time. Like Virginia Woolf did in Mrs Dalloway, Harvey turns time into the Bergsonian la durée or ‘lived time’ where duration is perceived in terms of our inner, subjective experiences.
There is yet another parallel with Woolf, who had once written of the six characters in The Waves that they are essentially the “same person”. The six astronauts may belong to different nationalities and have diverse temperaments, but up there, they form one collective being — Anton is the “heart”, Pietro the “mind”, Roman the “hands”, Shaun the “soul”, Chie the “conscience” and Nell the “breath”. They all think similar thoughts and it would be impossible for one to function without another. Unlike on the fraught planet hurtling through space, on the ISS, nationalities thus cease to matter. If this sense of optimism about a universal brotherhood seems ingenuous, the narratorial voice is quick to censor the reader that “hope does not make them naive”. Indeed, Harvey’s keen observation, her empathy for human foibles and her amazement at the Earth’s “fumbled harmony” make it hard to hold onto cynicism and not succumb to the hope for future redemption.