Orbital by Samantha Harvey

“The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.”

Orbital is a quiet little novel following six astronauts and their thoughts as they live on a spacecraft, hovering above Earth. Although it won the Booker Prize for Fiction 2024, I must admit that I went in not knowing a huge amount about the book or author, and that was a good way to go in.

The review

First, a warning that this is not a book for those that require plot, pace and action. Almost nothing (and everything) happens in Orbital. Second, I’m here to let you know that there are no speech marks. I’ll let you sit with that. So onto my thoughts! Orbital took my breath away with some truly illuminating and poetic passages. The lilting prose and blended dialogue served to play with time and I’d go as far as to say it played with my mind too. It made me feel like I was floating in space, which is quite a feat from my squishy sofa. There’s some gorgeous vignettes about life aboard spacecraft, but it’s mostly a book that nudges you to question what it means to be human and how much of our humanity is directly laced to the planet on which we reside. As a big nature lover, I appreciated the thought of experiencing Earth’s beauty from afar and quite liked the use of a typhoon to impress the skies’ eye view of a marker of climate change. My main bugbear is that while all the themes work as brilliant devices, we never get any depth! I’m usually somebody that can sit with lyrical prose, but I was desperate to learn more about the six characters and their families, I wanted closure of their relationships and stories. This book plays with you and spits you out. An interesting one to start 2025 off with, but this one won’t be for every reader.

P.S. I need the damn quotation marks!

Favourite quotes

“The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.”

“The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sights that are difficult to tell.”

“The creamy light off the ocean so exquisite; the gentle clouds rippling in tides. With a zoom lens the first fall of snow on the top of Mount Fuji, the silver bracelet of the Nagara River where she swam as a child. Just here, the perfect solar arrays drinking sun.”

“Until then, what can we do in our abandoned solitude but gaze at ourselves? Examine ourselves in endless bouts of fascinated distraction, fall in love and in hate with ourselves, make a theatre, myth and cult of ourselves. Because what else is there?”