Samantha Harvey’s Orbital is a quirky little novel, which charts a day in the life of six astronauts on a space-station, their relationship with each other, and ultimately, with the planet from which they come. They have been blasted into space to conduct experiments; they whizz round the atmosphere 16 times in 24 hours, 250 miles up.
It’s an exhilarating experience, for them and for us. These captives of chosen circumstances see more in a single day than most of us can hope to see in a lifetime. They are separated from life on earth by the nature of space itself, and the 17,500 miles an hour that they need to maintain to stay in orbit. They are kept on course by earth’s pull – in more ways than one.
The astronauts try to keep themselves tied to a sense of real time, marking off the days of their nine-month mission as they dawn. But it’s difficult, because while their minds keep a careful (and homely) tally of how many sets of clothes they’ve got through as they dart through the cosmos, their eyes tell a different story which has to be kept under control.
The moon, “their silver companion moving placidly through its phases while the days go awry”, is a constant presence. But they see it “several times a day and sometimes in strange distortion”. Meanwhile, a few permitted personal mementos take on a quasi-cultic quality, as well they might. Dealing with bitter news from home is very hard, when it comes.
As the astronauts circumnavigate the globe, countries slip past in seconds and continents in a matter of minutes. These international protagonists, two women and four men, get to view the world from outside, presumably to some extent as God also sees it. Yet instead of triumph or power a sense of insignificance lingers, despite the odd “sudden ambushing by happiness”.
It rubs off on the reader as well. Harvey divides the book itself into orbits: some breathless; some contemplative; some eerie. Many almost overwhelming questions of knowledge and identity arise. The astronauts swim around in zero-gravity, while around them bob packets of food and blobs of coffee. At one point a crucifix appears, floating up on a necklace.
They are all scientists, but occasionally the beauty of their vision lures them towards shades of earlier beliefs. “Sometimes they look at the earth and could be tempted to roll back all they know to be true … It seems so spectacular, dignified and regal. They could still be led to believe that God himself had dropped it there, at the very centre of the waltzing universe.”
Although “no negligible thing could shine so bright” we are reminded of its other, darker side when a typhoon makes landfall on the shores of the Indian Ocean. Fatal devastation is wrought as the local earth-dwellers face its fury: “they see the ocean roll over a town”. Bodies float down the streets and past a church; once more we glimpse Christ on the cross.
Harvey writes with a reassuring grasp of astrophysics and its effects on the human body, as well as its potential effects on the human mind; she credits NASA and the European Space Agency in the acknowledgements. But where the answer to complicated questions resides, stays open: on the space-station, looking down; on the earth, looking up; or elsewhere?
Away from the scientific instruments and precise science of the astronauts, as the typhoon rages people shelter in a straining chapel as the howling wind and foaming sea threaten to destroy the building, and them with it. All they can do is pray, “gathered around this little embroidered figure of the child Jesus”, familiar to Hispanic Catholics everywhere.
“It’s the Santo Niño that’s saving them, they’re inclined to believe. Even the non or less religious think it now … praying and praying, praying for hours … they suppose they must be witnessing a miracle.” By the time dawn comes all is, somehow, peaceful and calm: “An unearthly watery light fills the chapel, a smell of brine and wet wood. The children are safe.”
But by then the astronauts have left it all behind, hurtling towards 16 more new dawns as they continue their intoxicating journey through the heavens. When they return to Earth they will have advanced the cause of knowledge with many new scientific discoveries. And they will have been in space for as long as it takes for a new human to gestate and be born.
Helen Walsh teaches science to teenagers in Birmingham, UK.
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