{"id":10557,"date":"2024-12-04T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-04T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10557"},"modified":"2025-02-25T16:52:14","modified_gmt":"2025-02-25T21:52:14","slug":"orbital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/04\/orbital\/","title":{"rendered":"Orbital."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Samantha Harvey\u2019s Orbital<\/a><\/em> was a surprise winner of the Booker Prize in 2024, beating the favored Percival Everett\u2019s James<\/a><\/em> (which won the National Book Award a week later), and coming in as the second-shortest book to ever win the Booker, just a few pages longer than Penelope Lively\u2019s Offshore<\/em>. I can confirm that the book is, indeed, short. I am a bit flummoxed at what the judges saw here, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Orbital<\/em> takes place on the International Space Station and follows six astronauts, all from different countries, as they make many trips around the planet while living on the apparatus. The characters have first names and national origins, but very little else to distinguish them, just a breadcrumb of backstory here or there and some broad brush strokes like one being religious and another secular. The book lacks a single narrative throughline, instead rolling along with the station and tracking smaller movements \u2013 a bit of dialogue, a look at space, a memory from Earth \u2013 in language that can be lyrical but also insubstantial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/script>\n\n\n\n

There is nothing to grab hold of in Orbital<\/em>, neither plot nor character. I could not tell you a single character\u2019s name from the book. I could barely tell you anything interesting details about any character, even without needing to attach them to specific people. There are passages that feel more tangible, like one character\u2019s grieving over her mother\u2019s death while she\u2019s on the station, and another\u2019s memory of a visit to a fishing village that is threatened by a typhoon as they fly uselessly overhead, but they sit on top of the rest of the book; there is nothing to integrate them, such as using them to inform the characters, with anything else that transpires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The relative paucity of details around the characters creates a sense that they are less individuals than parts of a collective one, which could be a metaphor for humanity as a whole, and the way that these astronauts cooperate in space would then be a contrast to the way their home countries fall into conflict on terra firma. (After some diplomatic brouhaha, some astronauts aren\u2019t supposed to use the bathrooms in rival nations\u2019 parts of the station.) That\u2019s a tricky thing to do if you put any sort of national properties into the characters, but the downside of Harvey\u2019s approach is that she combines six entities painted with faint colors and the resulting whole just looks grey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was one moment in Orbital<\/em> that did stick with me, as it provoked the only real emotional reaction I had to the novel. The Russian cosmonaut likes to play with a ham radio and talk to random people as the station orbits, which also means the conversations can\u2019t last very long. The scene is whimsical and wistful, a symbol of the connections we can make with anybody, the endless curiosity of people everywhere, and the fleeting nature of those connections and our very existence. I wish Harvey had made all of Orbital <\/em>out of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: I\u2019m about 2\/3 of the way through Vajra Chandrasekera\u2019s The Saint of Bright Doors<\/a><\/em>, winner of this year\u2019s Nebula Award for Best Novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Samantha Harvey\u2019s Orbital was a surprise winner of the Booker Prize in 2024, beating the favored Percival Everett\u2019s James (which won the National Book Award a week later), and coming in as the second-shortest book to ever win the Booker, just a few pages longer than Penelope Lively\u2019s Offshore. I can confirm that the book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1359,1266,66,112],"class_list":["post-10557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2023-novels","tag-booker-prize","tag-british-literature","tag-english-literature","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10557"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10629,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10557\/revisions\/10629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}