My voyage through the Booker continues, but I’ve been fairly slack (I was on holiday and then I went to TUC and then to a wedding, hark at me) and so not just the longlist but indeed the shortlist has been announced now. My Friends and Headshot, the two books I have written about so far, didn’t make it, but Orbital by Samantha Harvey, the book I’ve just read and am about to write about, did.
A large-ish part of the reason why I was slack was that I found Orbital extremely hard going. It’s not a long book at all – 136 pages – but it is a book where, really, nothing happens. It’s about astronauts on the International Space Station, watching the Earth fly beneath them and thinking about life. They don’t have any problems with their air locks or encounter alien life. They don’t have forbidden space romance, or discover a portal to hell, or any of that.
I think perhaps the book is meant to be taken as a kind of prose poem; pretty writing about the planet and the stars folding down on you, to leave you feeling meditative about life and your own smallness. Perhaps it’s my failing as a reader rather than its failing as a book that I did struggle to take it this way. I just thought it was really, really boring and at points quite irritating.
“What can we do in our abandoned solitude but gaze at ourselves?”, Orbital asks, fairly early on: “Examine ourselves in endless bouts of fascination, fall in love and in hate with ourselves, make a theatre, myth and cult of ourselves. Because what else is there?”.
What else is there, in space? Aliens? A computer that’s evil, maybe? A planet, with apes on it? There’s loads, but none of it’s in Orbital. It’s all like this, really, a bit ponderous, some little snaps of the astronaut’s outside lives (one is mourning her mother; one is in a loveless marriage) and of them interacting, but really not enough to be considered plot. It has lots of details about what it’s like to be on the space station (you have to velcro your cutlery to the table, the mice being experimented on cling to the bars of their cages for lack of gravity, bits of human detritus float around in the vents) that are kind of interesting, but, again, really not enough to sustain a whole book.
Sometimes they just look at the planet (and here there is lots of undeniably pretty writing, about “ribbony” clouds and the way cities look like gems at night) but sometimes they meditate on other things. “When they look at the planet it’s hard to see a place for or a trace of the small and the babbling pantomime of politics on the newsfeed, and it’s as though that pantomime is an insult to the august stage on which it all happens”, the book observes at one point, before discussing how actually politics has shaped the earth below them. It’s not that things that are a bit obvious can’t be profound, and profoundly true – climate change is bad, give peace a chance – but I think this book doesn’t manage to work the affective meaning out of slightly platitudinous, GCSEish observations about humanity. But the Booker judging panel clearly thinks differently and who am I – an insignificant dot, hurling through space, but also, connected and shaped by the planet, the home on which I live, and isn’t that something – to argue with that.
I’m reading Creation Lake at the moment (a handful of pages in), which is the book on the list that I was most excited for and the one that made me want to read them all. Without prejudicing my own jury, I bet I’ll like it more than Orbital.
I would say my current ranking is something like
1) Headshot
2) My Friends
….far distant, whizzing inconsequentially through space…. 3)Orbital