Soul-searching in space

“A hand-span away beyond a skin of metal the universe unfolds in simple eternities.” This illuminating sentence from Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital prepares its readers for an unusual adventure, of gazing at the earth from outer space.

What seems to garner more attention about this novel is its length — it’s 136 pages long, as if something concise cannot comprehensively account for the ginormous forms of life on earth and what exists beyond it.

The first ‘space novel’ to win the prize, Orbital first generated interest for its meaningful engagement with the issues facing the human species, and the inability of any actor to acknowledge and address them. Four astronauts and two cosmonauts — hanging in an H-shaped metal above the earth in anticipation of doing what “routine astronauts in earth’s backyard” do — feature in this journey. However, what they end up experiencing befuddles them.

In an interview, the English novelist notes that when she began “writing about six people trapped in a tin can”, it resonated with “our experience of lockdown, of not being able to escape each other and also not being able to get to other people”.

When Chie in the novel shares her mother’s passing, the simplest reality hits her hard: How to grieve now, from here? The eeriness that people experienced of not being able to be with their loved ones in those trying times of the pandemic is captured in Orbital’s narration convincingly.

While Harvey notes that she “lost [her] nerve with it”, she pursued this book — her fifth — nonetheless. One is thankful about it, for it is perhaps one of the few such novels that circumambulates the pack of anxieties of modern-day life without losing its focus on the characters’ motivations, which inevitably propels the story.

Floating in space, these six people realise what it means to be tethered and grounded. Most importantly, they are confronted with two things: nothingness and meaninglessness. And something profound materialises when they’re faced with these undeniable truths.

Sample this: “When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it.”

Harvey’s prose is exalting and mesmerising throughout the book. Her piercing thoughts don’t trivialise experiences in the space station; instead, she elevates the levers of the debate of existence by offering nuanced critiques.

For example, Shaun is reminded of a discussion on the painting Las Meninas, ‘The Ladies-in-Waiting’, when he was in school. On one morning in space, he “finds himself staring at [the painting postcard], at all of the possibilities of subject and perspective that his wife wrote out on its reverse.”

He ponders: What is it about? Towards the end of the book, Pietro invites Shaun to pay attention to a tiny detail he had missed noticing, and like a meteorite exploding against the surface of the earth, the newly gained perspective shakes something up in Shaun. When the peripheral takes centre stage, then what becomes of the centre and its periphery?

Perhaps that seems to be the point of this book: to re-examine the arithmetic of everyday living, to attend to the banal, and to let go of the self-centrist, self-serving notion that has ended up dividing people, making the very planet where life is possible, earth, an uninhabitable space.

It bears asking, what did it take for these six people to become introspective in microgravity? What role did distance — and the distortion of time — play for them to revisit their backstories — their family histories, the first moments when they thought they’d like to scale outer space, the precious memories with their partners and children?

Because the intergalactic space is nothing like earth — it urges you to consider one of the two possibilities: Is it like being trapped here? Or is it an unbounded freedom that’s there to relish, floating in this strange dimension? There are no easy answers. For no progress humankind has made can answer what sparks the consciousness to be situationally aware of things that awaken new channels of thinking. This feeling is graspable and ungraspable at the same time.

From the discussion of taking lab rats in outer space to directing one’s thoughts towards those lost in the Challenger disaster of 1986 (somehow, I could only think of Kalpana Chawla reading this, whose loss felt personal as a child); from mentioning the sheer gender divide when it comes to space exploration to exploring the place and futility of nationalistic sentiments and the hubris of men in microgravity; from appreciating the unending beauty of the earth to losing your grip on reality, everything in this sparse novel is as “ferocious” and luminous as stardust.

While the space may signal its “empty indifference” towards humans, there’s an acute attention Harvey pays to everything tumbling around us with an exacting clarity that’s unlikely to be calibrated with this precision by novelists to come.