For the Beauty of the Earth
Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023)
Reviewed by Sarah Selden
In 1922, James Joyce shook the literary world by publishing Ulysses. Despite its 700-page length, the novel’s plot is limited to a single day in Dublin, Ireland. Three years later, Virginia Woolf published another landmark modernist novel that takes place in a single day: Mrs Dalloway. Through these limited timelines, Joyce and Woolf were both able to explore the human interior in ways that had not been done in literature before, from episodes that take place completely in an outhouse in Ulysses to the interior horrors of shellshock in Mrs Dalloway. Both these novels also pioneered the free-indirect discourse style as well, causing readers and writers alike to reconsider what constitutes a novel.
Nearly 100 years later, Samantha Harvey continues this tradition with her Booker-longlisted Orbital. This novel also stretches the parameters of the genre as it follows a day in the life of four astronauts (Chie, Pietro, Shaun, and Nell) and two cosmonauts (Roman and Anton) living aboard the International Space Station. No exact date is given, but there are many reference to the aging space station and the fact that it will soon be decommissioned and crash into the Pacific, setting the novel in the late 2020s. It explores the characters’ deepest thoughts, fears, and most human of moments as they pass through 16 orbits around the earth on a single day of their nine-month mission. Harvey’s style is reminiscent of Joyce and Woolf’s in its distinctness—many reviewers have noted the novel’s lack of plot and propensity to drift between characters’ perspectives without warning. The novel’s narrator also makes a curious seventh character that drifts in and out of the narrative, often interjecting as the text transitions between the inner worlds of the human characters. Through this exploration of space and style, Harvey gets at the very heart of what it means to be human in just 207 pages.
As Harvey joins the tradition of setting novels over a single day, she also enters the increasingly relevant conversation about humans in space. Over the past several years, the fictional fascination with space travel has continued to grow. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar will be re-released to theaters this month to celebrate its tenth anniversary, and Andy Weir’s The Martian, a successful novel (2013) and movie (2015) in its own right, was followed by another successful space-set novel in 2021 called Project Hail Mary. Even romantic comedies are somehow connected to space exploration these days—this summer’s Fly Me to the Moon, starring Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johanson, was met with mostly positive reviews. And, as our stories become increasingly focused on life beyond our planet, the possibility of traveling to space has become more plausible than ever before. Virgin Galactic has completed six successful test flights for their commercial spacecraft in the past six months. Their slogan is “turning the impossible into the inevitable.”
While Virgin Galactic’s advertising emphasizes the glamor of space travel, Orbital is much more focused on what it means to exist as a human in the most unhuman of contexts. The novel opens with “Orbit minus 1,” recounting the final orbit of the previous day. Each of the humans “hang in their sleeping bags,” moments before they wake, tethered to the walls of the space station, just six of the many objects described to be floating around. It’s a strange picture to open with, and the narrator jumps straight to its philosophical ramifications—“What are they doing here? Why do they go nowhere but round and round?” (3-4). The answer seems to be the seductiveness of the earth itself: “the earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits” (4).
Indeed, the novel then pulls the reader into the most mundane daily habits of the astronauts, much like Joyce does in Ulysses. The narrator describes how the six must clip their nails periodically and then vacuum stray clippings out of air ducts over and over again and how they are required to exercise for two hours each day to prevent muscle atrophy. Through the futility of such tasks in an environment that Shaun muses is “four inches of titanium away from death,” the question of “what are they doing here?” looms large (7, 3).
They are each “here” to do something. Nell and Chie run experiments on mice in an attempt to discern how to best support life in a zero-gravity environment. Shaun monitors plant growth with a similar aim. They pass information back and forth with a ground crew about their findings and about a recently launched mission to the moon. The six also photograph a rapidly intensifying typhoon that is barreling toward the Philippines and struggle with feelings of helplessness as things grow worse than meteorologists had originally predicted.
As these characters go about their daily mundanity and more meaningful research, they also spend a sizeable portion of their day contemplating some of the greatest artistic achievements of human history. Shaun reflects on a postcard of Velasquez’s Las Meninas, which he learned about in school and found to be “the height and depth of all futility” until the girl who had been sitting next to him gave him that postcard on their wedding day years later (9). Harvey’s discussion of the painting could be an essay in itself, but the way the characters discuss the question of the painting’s subject at different pockets throughout the novel paints an insightful picture of how the human mind interacts with art, coming back to it again and again as it makes meaning. Roman thinks about which pieces of music should and should not have been included on the Voyager golden record in 1977, as he attempts to connect with an earth-bound man via radio. The group also reflects on the famous photograph that Michael Collins took during the moon landing, dubbing him the “world’s loneliest man” as they discuss the other team of astronauts currently barreling toward the moon. Thoughts of these three achievements both celebrate the best of humanity and inspire questions about what makes us meaningful—what limited possessions should we bring to space? What should we share with extraterrestrial civilizations? Do any of these achievements matter if we are away from our loved ones?
This distance from the comforts of earth and loved ones becomes the central conflict of the novel for many of the characters. Anton is intensely envious of the astronauts on the moon mission—as he aspires to one day live on Mars—but he finds a concerning lump on his neck. He also realizes his need to escape his loveless marriage. Nell mourns the lack of time she gets with her husband, who has moved home to Ireland, a country she has never visited because she is so often gone due to her line of work. Chie experiences the most tragedy of the six, receiving word that her mother has died unexpectedly. Only halfway through her nine-month mission with no possibility of a quick return to earth, she makes the difficult decision to tell her relatives to hold the funeral without her and spends much of the day struggling with the fact that she will not see her mother before she is cremated. All these personal tragedies are set against the backdrop of the impending typhoon making landfall, as Shaun contemplates what his Filipino fisherman friend could possibly do to save his family in this situation.
Through these both personal and global catastrophes, tension builds, and it never quite resolves, which is perhaps to be expected in a novel that takes place over the course of one day. None of these problems are easily solvable. The typhoon’s last-minute shift that quells fears of total destruction reminds the astronauts just how little control they have.
As the ISS passes over the remnants of the storm, the novel ends with the narrator’s apt description of the earth: “Its light is an ensemble of a trillion things which rally and unify for a few short moments before falling back into the rin-tin-tin and jumbled tumbling of static galactic woodwind rainforest trance of a wild and lilting world” (207). This portrayal of how light bounces off the earth in view from the ISS mirrors the mental experiences of the characters in this book, and indeed of the human experience in general. Amidst terrifying existential questions, the mundanity of human bodily functions and daily work, and deep emotional experiences, there are glimmers of wonder and awe at the beauty of the earth and humanity at large that “rally and unify” for fleeting moments, as many of the characters experience while they look down upon their home planet. Through this cacophony of human emotions, Harvey pays homage to the complexity of life, which is perhaps the only answer to the question of “why they go nowhere but round and round”—to enjoy the “complex orchestra of sounds” that make up the earth (4, 207).
Sarah Selden earned her bachelor's in English and secondary education at Palm Beach Atlantic University and her master's in English and American studies at the University of Oxford. She has taught English in Palm Beach County, in Spain on a Fulbright grant, and currently teaches in Littleton, Colorado.
