Orbital - Samantha Harvey (2024 Booker Prize Nominee)

 

(This begins what will likely be a months-long project to read and review the thirteen 2024 Booker Prize nominees. I read James by Percival Everett, another of the nominees, in June 2024. That review can be found here.)

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The premise of Samantha Harvey's Orbital is a promising one that offers numerous possibilities for exploration. Six people are in orbit around the earth in the international space station: two Russian men, an American man, a British woman, an Italian man, and a Japanese woman. Three of them have already been there for three months by the time that the other three arrive to begin their own six-month stints in obit around the planet. At this point, the reader would expect to learn more about the daily routines and assignments of the individual astronauts, their motivations for being there, a little about how they ended up becoming space explorers, and maybe best of all, what kind of personal relationships, emotional bonds, or irritations from each other's constant presence will develop over time. 

And to be fair, there's some of all of those things in Orbital. Just not enough.

Harvey tries hard to make each of her six characters into the unique individuals they deserve to be, even going so far as to labeling them this way early on:

Anton (Russian) - "the spaceship's heart,"

Pietro (Italian) - "its mind,"

Roman (Russian) - "its hands" and current captain,

Shaun (American) - "its soul,"

Chie (Japanese) - "its conscious," and

Nell (British) - "its breath."

Harvey, especially at first, offers some compelling, well-written observations such as when she mentions that the six are a kind of "floating family." She says:

"They are both much more and much less than that. Even the slightest mood swing can drastically change how they see and feel about each other. They sometimes get a feeling of merging."

...or when she explains how safe they all have come to feel inside their self-contained little world:

"...they are encapsulated, a submarine moving alone through the vacuum depths, and when they leave it they will feel less safe. They will reappear on the earth's surface as strangers of a kind. Aliens learning a mad new world."

There are just not enough moments like these despite the personal losses and fears some of the six try to keep hidden from the rest of the crew.  This is not a long book (probably the shortest of the thirteen nominees), and the reader is only along for the ride for 16 days worth of orbits. The sights outside the space station windows can change only so much, and the observations and reactions of six people to those sights even less. With repetition, those observations, and the prose used to describe them, begin to get less and less striking or effective relatively quickly. 

I hate to say it, but I was ready to reach the end of Orbital long before I got there. I hoped it would be saved by one of those big, dramatic endings that sometimes work so well, but Orbital just sort of fizzled away until it was done and gone.

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Personal Ratings for 2024 Booker Prize Nominees:

James - Percival Everett - 4.5 stars

Orbital  - Samantha Harvey - 2.0 stars