AFTER reading Samantha Harvey's The Shapeless Unease in 2020, I solemnly promised myself that I would never, ever read any of her books again. And yet, in the week after the announcement that she'd won the Booker Prize with Orbital, I am prostrating myself before her ingenuity.
The Shapeless Unease was about a woman who has to get on with her life while sleeping less and less. It's like one of those dreams in which you drive a car, have to brake, and the brakes just won't fully engage. It heads for a mess – and the mess is in the mind of the reader, who increasingly takes on the frustration of the sleepless woman.
About 20 pages in from the beginning of Orbital, the disdain for Samantha Harvey's work is gone. She takes possession of your imagination so swiftly that you're left amazed. As one day passes on Earth, six astronauts experience daybreaks and sunsets 16 times. Harvey spent a lot of time watching the hidden camera recordings of life on the ISS (international satellite station) during the Covid lockdown in Britain. Her description of the six people's daily lives is the corollary.
The abundance of small details alone makes the novel a tour de force. Harvey counters the old belief that astronauts make contact with the larger cosmos in their orbits. Of course, they do see it differently than we ordinary mortals, but Harvey conjectures that any meditative impulse will eventually make the connection between cosmic things and the earth. The planet that gives meaning to all mortals. The planet to which they are connected daily thanks to modern technology. The planet that is constantly on their minds while conducting science experiments, or talking about death.
Because as a writer she has already described the horrible process of prolonged insomnia, she also knows that the reader will react in a specific way to the claustrophobic milieu she uses here. We're going to watch and cheer on six astronauts maintaining their terrestrial connection.
She writes in the introductory chapter: “They will each be here for nine months or so, nine months of this weightless drifting, nine months of this swollen head, nine months of this sardine living, nine months of this earthward gaping, then back to the patient planet below.”
There are two Russian astronauts, Roman and Anton, two female astronauts, the Japanese Chie and the Brit Nell, and then the Italian Pietro and American Shaun.
Harvey is quick to impress on you that the six are in extraordinary circumstances, but that they respond to all that is happening below on earth in their customary, habitual way. In the first chapter, in which the focus is on Roman, Chie receives the news that her mother has passed away. Within a few paragraphs, Harvey makes sure we know what kind of person each of them is – everyone reacts to Chie's news. It happens so subtly that you don't notice how swiftly you surrender to the charm of Orbital.
Roman is also the astronaut with whom Harvey concludes the novel. At this stage, one's mind has already been opened up to the encyclopedic sensations and insights that Harvey so effortlessly scatters.
He seems to know that something is ending, that all good things must go this way, towards fracture and fallout. So many astronauts and cosmonauts have passed through here, this orbiting laboratory, this science experiment in the carefully controlled nurturing of peace. It’s going to end.
But it's not going to end until they're back on Earth. Chie consoles herself that her mother is still alive for her, and will only be truly dead when she puts her feet back on the planet. Meanwhile, Capcom (the control centre on Earth) feeds them with the strangest bits of daily news. They can see the real news on their computers, but Capcom makes sure they know, for example, that the record for the number of times one human is struck by lightning has just been improved again. And how a moon landing mission is faring elsewhere in the wide expanse.
As the orbits pass (16 within 24 hours), one gets a glimpse of cultural differences and similarities. Chie makes lists of all sorts of things that annoy her and give her pleasure. Here are the reassuring things that, as the space station circles the Earth at incredible speeds, give her confidence in life:
The earth below
Mugs with sturdy handles
Trees
Wide stairways
Home-knits
Nell’s singing
Strong knees
Pumpkins
Samantha Harvey's style is lyrical and evocative; while reading I frequently referred to Google Earth to try to get a picture of exactly what the astronauts are seeing. But one has to imagine looking over the shoulders of someone peeking through the small hatches of the space station. There's something intimate about the geographical exploration, punctuated with Harvey's sober recollection of bodily functions. Lyrical, with a hint of smell.
It's usually when you reread some of the chapters that you notice how comfortable Harvey is with bringing up other issues. Her description of the Russian living space (the oldest part of the space station) and the sloppy way Roman and Anton live is an extremely amusing way of showing how the patriarchal system is still embedded in Russian life. In similar ways, she draws very interesting comparisons between the American and Italian cultural underpinnings, superficialities, and philosophical insights.
I'm sure Orbital is going to provoke a lot of conversation with an ecological angle. That's OK. One doesn't have to fully participate. Sometimes what one looks for in a book is much like what Pietro craves up there in space during the third revolution of the day: a nice cosy rug with an aimless design.
A novel's success is not measured by literary prizes or the extent to which it promotes ecological debate. It will be set against the mind journeys you went on while reading the book. For me these were the splinters of references to politics, to the explorers of the 18th and 19th centuries, to the geography of Africa versus that of South America. Samantha Harvey wishes to create those fragments for you, you soon realise. Her storytelling lies in the way she uses the routine existence in a spacecraft as a stimulus – and above all the minds of the six weightless souls within it.
Orbital is a rich novel. Earth, essentially the protagonist, doesn't speak at all, but thanks to Harvey's flight of imagination into the skulls of the six astronauts, it has the final say.
I'll have to read The Shapeless Unease again. I must have misjudged it.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey is published by Grove Press and costs R269 at Takealot.
♦ VWB ♦
BE PART OF THE CONVERSATION: Go to the bottom of this page to share your opinion. We look forward to hearing from you.
Kerneels Breytenbach is a former publisher and journalist from Cape Town. He also authored the short story collection Morsdood van die Honger, the novels Glimlag, Piekniek by Hangklip, Ester, and Hond se Gedagte, and the cookbook Die Lekkerste Lekker. He often writes for magazines about food and restaurants, and as a journalist has also become known as an expert on pop music.
To comment on this article, register (it's fast and free) or log in.
First read Vrye Weekblad's Comment Policy before commenting.