It might sound like one of those jokes that begins with “An Italian, a Japanese woman, an American, an English woman, and a couple of Russians enter an International Space Station for six months to circle our planet sixteen times a day at 17,500 miles per day.” time and…” But no: ‘Orbital’ by the unpredictable Samantha Harvey (Kent, 1975) and winner of last year’s Booker Prize is a serious novel, sharp, serious and, of course, weightless not by character but by plot. NOVEL ‘Orbital’ Author Samantha Harvey Publisher Anagrama Year 2025 Pages 200 Price 18.90 euros 4And another thing that readers of ‘Orbital’ should not expect: here no techno-catastrophe ‘à la’ Michael Crichton, total absence of stowaway presences marks ‘Alien’ (which does not exclude some hypothetical and minimalist burst of robotic-extraterrestrial thought), as well as none of the dense documentation bio-cosmic in that of Carl Sagan or Kim Stanley Robinson (although there are perfect and well-measured micro-doses of the interior tasks that they carry out on the borders with almost outer space, in low Earth orbit and four hundred kilometers from the Earth). Nothing thunderous and gimmicky-special ‘space-opera’ in ‘Orbital’: a lot of pastoral-sidereal and very ‘ambient’ chamber music. And, of course, another day – ‘Orbital’ covers just 24 hours – at the office: the six of them have a lot to do and experiment and keep an eye on/with what it does or breaks down to their bodies. But they also have a lot of time to dedicate to their minds, a lot to think about and – Harvey is also the author of ‘An Indefinite Malaise’, a very interesting treatise on her insomnia – to stay up late and daydream about. Dreams that, sometimes, include the nightmares of those who know they are privileged guests to the most fragile of limbos. In truth, everything we are told about—in a third-person eyelidless omniscient who seems to see everything—looks and is launched as if assembling the narrative epiphanies of Michael Ondaatje and Anne Michaels driven by the tone of philosophy.’ travelogue’ by Geoff Dyer (there’s that very ‘Dyerian’ atomic fusion of ‘Las Meninas’ with that full-length photo of the entire house of humanity taken by Michael ‘Apollo 11’ Collins). Marital problems, metaphysical doubts… the frightened curiosity about the dawn of an era of machines ready to supplant them. Add to the above radioactive particles – as the critic James Wood pointed out in ‘The New Yorker’ – from a ‘Melvillean’ drift in the that the multi-symbolic whale is not persecuted because the protagonists of ‘Orbital’ already transmit what they do from the guts of a steel leviathan. Good mix, powerful fuel for a deceptively short (but not small) book that somehow, from its condensed format, refers to the heart of the matter: we are nothing more than grains of dusty stellar sand suspended in the immensity of what that surrounds us without even bothering to corner us. Thus, Harvey’s floats like a Virginia Woolf’s not in a river on the way to a lighthouse but in the Milky Way illuminated by the sun. Yes: from so far away, the figurative earthly problems begin to look rather abstract (like that relentless typhoon in the Pacific that becomes somewhat irrelevant compared to the suspended migraines and the little taste of food courtesy of the loss of smell). And the style mutates from the functionally narrative to a certain modernist abstraction that suddenly, so that to those stationed in space, their place of origin no longer seems something solid but rather something “fluid and shiny.” And those stationed there understand that their vision from the most privileged of perspectives does not make the manners of our increasingly exorbitant and less stellar star more understandable. And nothing better than the packaging of those seemingly almost automata astronauts to carry out such a narrative maneuver. Four men and two women “so together and so alone” that they know they are almost machines but who – we are informed of this with the most fair and measured words – have not been able to avoid carrying extra luggage of everything they have left downstairs. Marital problems, metaphysical doubts, sick or recently deceased relatives, the frightened curiosity about the dawn of an era of machines ready to supplant them. All this while they manipulate microbes and mice, knowing they are microscopic guinea pigs who, even when they sleep, are aware of the rotation of those untended beds that they left in their earthly bedrooms. New linkAnd yes: if you think about it a little, in all the previous fictions Harvey (who reported that she started writing ‘Orbital’ a decade ago but only felt ready to finish it during the covid-lockdown) freely addresses the theme of seclusion and physical and mental alteration and a certain existential solipsism. In ‘The Wilderness’ we were invited to witness the tides of Alzheimer’s lapping at the shores of an architect’s memory; ‘All Is Song’ explored the boundaries between love and obligation between parents and children; ‘Dear Thief’ traced the lines of an oppressive love triangle inspired by Leonard Cohen’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’; and ‘The Western Wind’ accompanied an almost reclusive priest in medieval Somerset in the 15th century. In some ways, ‘Orbital’ is a new link in this Harvey chain. And it paradoxically refers—scientific and non-fictional—and evokes the two greatest cathedrals of science fiction. On the one hand, it reads as if it were a memorious and guilty ‘Solaris’ by Stanislaw Lem but without extraterrestrial interference; On the other hand, it sounds as if we were hearing the ‘Blue Danube’ as background music: that waltz that Johann Strauss unknowingly composed for Stanley Kubrick to (dis)arrange in his own way in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. To float
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