If you didn’t read Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning novel Orbital꧃ in 2024, do so in 2025. Harvey’s book revolves around six astronauts who are brought together on a spacecraft that does a ninety-minute transit around the earth and thereby, 16 such orbits daily. A narration of their scientific experiments could have simply been science-fiction or a study of the interaction between the six characters in a closed space—and it does do that. However, the book is far more than that. It unfolds the full splendour of Mother Earth as seen from far beyond the Karman line. The concept of day and night is witnessed all at once vividly across the full girth of the planet with Papua New Guinea divided: “The island’s day-lit half lies lush and dragon-like, its mountains mythical in the long last night, its coasts outlined by bioluminescent shores. Its dark half is a shadow on royal blue water.” The wonder that is the earth unfolds, which Harvey describes as “…theatrics, the opera, the earth’s atmosphere, airglow, and sometimes it’s the smallest things, the lights of fishing boats off the coast of Malaysia dotted starlike in the black ocean.” The beauty of the earth without a trace of human footprints, except for the nighttime lights, when seen from the spacecraft is that of a planet unsullied, with no signs of environmental degradation and destruction. It is as haloed as all the other planets, as alluring and mysterious.
Yet, amidst all this, each of the six astronauts go through their own moments of introspection and reflection on things that in the more mundane earthly existence may not have generated similar depth. But these thoughts exist because the six men and women have a contextual pull towards the landmass; there are relationships, images, memories, emotions that bind them to earth even from a space that has no gravitational pull. These characters are very different from each other and yet in this small, confined space they are the world unto each other. Think of Anton’s innocence, when he remembers how his father made him believe that he would be the next Russian to step on the moon and pick the Korovka candy left next to the Russian flag. And the moment when they pass Bolivia’s bright orange Laguna Colorada and the wind-cut folds of the Kavir desert that finally brings the resolve to be able to say, “Zabudem, ladno✱”, let’s forget it, to a loveless marriage. Or the perplexed thoughts of Nell and Shaun, where the latter cannot understand how Nell can be an astronaut and not believe in God and Nell wondering how Shaun could be an astronaut and believe in God. “…..a tree made by the hand of nature, and a tree made by the hand of the artist. It’s barely any difference at all, and the profoundest difference in the world.”
𓂃Chie, the Japanese woman, has lost her mother while she is on the spacecraft. She is mystified by the karmic connection that a picture of her mother taken by her father could have been prophesising the future! Was it that just as her mother had escaped by a sliver when Nagasaki got bombed, she wanted Chie to understand her providence that the picture, taken on the day man landed on the moon, was leading Chie to outer space?
Orbital💖 is a work of a higher order; philosophical at a very fine level while also observing the mundane aspects of human life. It is a narrative about the existential crisis of humankind caused by the over-exploitation of the earth. It raises deeper questions about what it means to be alive, to be human. In the context of space and time, who are we and do we even matter? It’s a humbling work because it reminds you how insignificant you are, whichever dimension you measure against. You think you can read it fast, after all, it’s only 136 pages long, but every page makes you stop, ponder, translate the elements to existential space and pushes you to think beyond the obvious.
💝Through the six astronauts who are the protagonists, Harvey is able to question so many dimensions of human life. The capsule is like a ring fence far removed from the earth; it’s floating in what we think of as the universe from our viewpoints. The book shares an aerial view of the earth, which looks beautiful and alluring, until you remember Chie’s understanding of what human greed has made of the planet.
ℱThis comment on politics stands out: “ If politics were just a farcical, inane, at times insane entertainment provided by characters who for the most part have got where they are, not by being in any way revolutionary or percipient or wise in their views, but by being louder, bigger, more ostentatious, more unscrupulously wanting of the play of power than those around them, if that were the beginning of the end of the story.” But sadly, it’s a force that has shaped every single thing on the surface of the earth that they had thought was ‘human-proof’. Harvey displays incisive understanding when she links the disintegrating glaciers, the oil spills, lithium mining and the vanishing mangroves of Mumbai, to the hand of politics and the incessant interplay of human hunger for power and unending need. Is that hunger limited to a few? No. It’s a billion times extrapolated, though the degrees may vary. Take the instance of Chie’s interpretation of the photograph of her mother standing on the beach in 1969, on the day humankind landed on the moon. To Chie, it is her mom’s reminder that one must never forget the price humanity pays for moments of glory because humanity simply doesn’t know when to stop.
ಌHarvey makes you question the concept of time itself. As you turn the pages, you are bound to reflect on the inflated ego that humans have come to possess, with the belief that they are ‘superior’ beings who control not just this planet, but other planets and potentially other solar systems too. The capsule goes around the earth 16 times in what we understand to be a 24-hour day, with one sunrise and one sunset, a concept that is so easily put to rest by the speed of the space shuttle. What then is a time zone? That a continent lapses and gives way to another, that the earth so beloved, never stays in your grasp. “That the ride of your life will pass in an eyeblink, just as life does to the aging brain whose slowing makes everything appear to move faster.”
I have read the book twice already and yet I feel there is so much more to be shared about it. But I don’t want to do that. I would like readers themselves to discover the meaning of Chie’s mother’s death, the typhoon blowing over the Philippines, Shaun’s lessons from the painting ‘Las Meninas’♋ and so much else that this amazing work has to offer.
Rupinder Pannu Brar is Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Coal, Government of India
