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Gran Canaria’s steep radial gorges pile the island up like sandcastles hastily built, and when the Atlas mountains announce the end of the desert, clouds appear in the shape of a shark whose tail flips at the southern coast of Spain, whose fin-tip nudges the southern Alps, whose nose will dive any moment into the Mediterranean.
Orbital, Samantha Harvey’s latest novel, will serve best if you think of it as a sort of educational picture book, with generous, full color images done in prose description. Another orbit almost completed, the Christmas season is greeting us, and this would make a good gift for a diligent if slightly dreamy high schooler. Orbital’s setting is a space station, and those images are of Earth, roundly perceived from a considerable distance as a various and varying surface. Harvey’s subjects are both humanity in space, regimented and baffled, and humanity’s home seen from space, splendid and vulnerable. Cosmic as it is, the novel doesn’t offer the more concentrated satisfactions of literature, the particular web of understandings and allusions, but rather some information about weather patterns, or about the diet of an astronaut, and some sights newly seen from its isolated, exalted view.
Orbital starts with an actual image, a diagram of “24 Hours of Earth Orbits With Daylight in the Northern Hemisphere,” which shows the curved paths of the space station over a flattened globe. This is Harvey’s narrative timeframe, in which sixteen sunsets and sunrises will blaze through the station’s windows, and Earth will be seen in her many aspects. On board are four astronauts and two cosmonauts: four men and two women. They will not be menaced by an alien or scattered into space by an asteroid. Instead, they exercise, eat, maintain the station, run their experiments, and look back at Earth, remembering. Cyclical and mundane as all this can feel, history is still happening. This is the last mission of its kind on a rundown and retro piece of 90s hardware, and a separate lunar mission is underway. (The six joke with the relayed ground crews as the lunar explorers are “catapulted past them in a five-billion-dollar blaze of suited-booted glory.”) Orbital anticipates the end of the International Space Station’s service, a coordinated plunge into the sea in a few years time, which will also be the end of the international cooperation it has both required and represented. The novel feels somewhat retro itself, telling us that we are the world by picturing all those continents and countries as “endlessly connected, an epic poem of flowing verses.” It says with more gusto that we need the world, at least for now. Ecological collapse approaches, we are reminded. An English astronaut, Nell, recalls deep-sea diving—which is a little like maneuvering in low gravity through the cramped station—to see a precious, glorious coral reef near the Philippines. And Harvey gives herself a few paragraphs in “Orbit 7” to tell us about shrinking ice sheets and burning oil spills, and how our home has been ravaged by the “politics of growing and getting.”
In an interview for the Times Literary Supplement podcast, Harvey recalls watching footage from the International Space Station in preparation for writing. She is determined to share her awestruck knowledge. What does Earth look like from space? “The sea is flat and copper with reflected sun and the shadows of the clouds are long on the water. Asia come and gone. Australia a dark featureless shape against this last breath of light, which has now turned platinum.” The sights change as the orbital paths center on different parts of the globe, an aurora comes into view, or a typhoon develops. There are enough of these passages, each a few hundred words, that they start to feel a little too insistent, though they yield fine moments like an accelerated sunrise over Earth’s rim rendered as a “hundred-cymbal clang of sudden daylight.” The novel insists on this relatively new, 20th century development: this bird’s eye view from space.
The theme of perspective is introduced early when Shaun, the American representative, recalls a classroom discussion of Velázquez’s Las Meninas, in which we see a mirror’s reflection placing the king and queen where we are standing (more on that in a bit). He has a postcard from his wife with a reproduction of the painting on which she has written that it depicts the “labyrinth of mirrors that is human life,” and he will later call this labyrinth a “matrix of vanities” There is an irony on board, which Harvey notes, in that these brilliant astronauts have a sort of pre-Galilean view of an Earth apparently in stasis, and this relates to an anthropocentric understanding of the universe. Nell watches the edges of Europe on a “stately and resplendent sphere,” a globe that looks to her like the “palace of a king or queen.” Humanity is as high as Velázquez’s patrons, perhaps, if we only realized it. Shaun’s been giving Italian astronaut Pietro some informal Bible schooling, so that when Pietro looks at the glistening sea he remembers how “God lays the beams of his upper chambers on the waters.” Nell’s husband remarks that Africa photographed from space looks like a J.M.W. Turner. There are signs of an artist or architect at work from the orbital perspective. How is it that we have the eyes to see them? Here is something Harvey may not quite have considered when she involved the very fraught Velázquez and had her spacemen questing after its subject: the reflection of the king and queen in the mirror could be that of yet another painting—it certainly looks like paint. We are not posing for our portrait for the first time, giving the painter his subject; we are already painted, created in an image that is not our own.
Harvey thinks that when we look in the mirror we see only a clever ape, but she recognizes that the astronauts want more. In their confinement and their professional camaraderie, the six sometimes think with a collective mind, which considers the orbit, with its faithful repetitions, as “attention and servitude, a sort of worship.” This may be the cosmopolitan religion of the future, certainly for people living in lunar orbit. But if the whole arrangement is not just a universe populated with evolved beings but creation filled with creatures, then Earth ought to be cherished not for its own sake, not as Gaia, a false idol, but as the home where He saw fit to place us. As a young man, Shaun was a stargazer and wanted to be a fighter pilot. Now looking back the other way from the station he studies geography, not from a map but from the territory. There is something to know in a more loving way, not to be understood as a diagram or a brute concrete fact. Thinking of his wife, he notes that “the Earth you could know in the way you know another person.”
FICTION
Orbital
by Samantha Harvey
Atlantic Monthly Press
Published December 5th, 2023
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