Orbital by Samantha Harvey: A perfectly formed work of fiction. Photo / supplied
Orbital by Samantha Harvey: A perfectly formed work of fiction. Photo / supplied
In a day, the International Space Station swings around the Earth 16 times. Space tries to rid its inhabitants of the notion of days – “it takes their 24 hours and throws 16 days and nights at them in return.”
Orbital spends that day, those 16 revolutions, with six souls‒ four astronauts and two cosmonauts ‒ suspended above the planet in their “great H of metal”, crossing oceans and borders. Not much happens. Sure, there is a typhoon steaming towards Indonesia and the Philippines. But the astronauts’ time awake is taken up with tasks – monitoring microbes and mice, crystals, cress and cabbages, cleaning and fixing, taking photographs, eating, exercising. “Their day is mapped by acronyms, MOP, MPC, PGO, RR, MRI, CEO, OESI, WRT for WSS, T-T-A-B.”
Beneath the fiction lies an incredible amount of fact-gathering, but the fundamental interest of Samantha Harvey – each of whose novels is singular: a death in a medieval village, a man struck with Alzheimer’s, an epistolary novel of friendship and betrayal – lies in what makes us human. Amid the duties, the six think and remember and fear and hope for their families below, hopelessly bound by gravity. And worry about a planet “contoured and landscaped by want”.
Were it only for the author’s research and supreme act of imagination, Orbital would be a worthy Booker finalist. But it is also a work of sustained luminous prose, not least the splendidly elegant variation in sunrises and continents slipping beneath them. “The vast spill of day” … “just as the ocean runs out” … “pile the island up like a sandcastle hastily built”. Though never less than captivating, its novella-length brevity also ensures it doesn’t outstay its welcome. A perfectly formed work of fiction.
Orbital, by Samantha Harvey (Vintage, $26), is on sale now.
