Learning to read Samantha Harvey’s ‘Orbital’

Samantha Harvey‘s delicate 136-page novel Orbital won 2024’s Booker Prize. It marks a notable shift of the difficulty of the last few Booker winners—Lynch’s Prophet Song (2023), Karunatilaka’s Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022), Galgut’s The Promise (2021), and Stuart’s Shuggie Bain (2020)—to an easier style, even if not a typical plot of a novel.

Harvey is also the first woman winner of the prestigious Booker since the double winners in 2019 (Atwood’s The Testaments and Evaristo’s Girl Woman Other). Orbital compares more than favourably to both.

I think it is magisterial.

Orbital tells the story of six astronauts encircling the earth over a twenty-four hour period. In that time, they orbit the earth sixteen times: they see sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets. They are off kilter, out of time, and outside conventional perspective: ‘[T]hey are so together, and so alone’.¹

Each of the astronauts, with their siloed thoughts, tells their own story to the reader, while a typhoon rages below on earth, threatening lives and livelihoods. The astronauts, aware of the impending tragedy, can do nothing but observe and report.

Travel that disorients

One of the things that struck me while reading this book was its unconventionality. It has no beginning–muddle–end structure typical of fiction. Instead it sticks to the logic of circularity and repetition, mirroring the journey of the astronauts as they travel around the globe, occasionally passing places twice within the twenty-four hours.

Sometimes these journeys disorient the reader when the astronauts pass somewhere twice, but from different directions.

East is not always to the right; west is not always to the left.

The plot structure, like the trajectory of the International Space Station, is circular and off-kilter. Peaks are not climactic; there is no definitive end to the story.

Disorienting art

How do we read books that confound our expectations? As readers, when we are confounded we are jolted out of our comfortable seats—even in a book like Orbital that strikes a muted, calming tone.

Orbital gives us a couple of ways of reading itself. One of them is the depiction of a Velázquez painting, Las Meninas. In a class in school, astronaut Shaun met his future wife while they were asked to contemplate the painting. The teacher has asked them, ‘So what is the real subject of the painting[?]’ (p. 6), while they look at the king and queen in the mirror being painted, the ladies-in-waiting (translation of ‘las meninas‘) to one side, or their daughter who is centre stage. We are even shown the image of Velázquez who is painting.

The teacher offers that it might be a ‘painting about nothing[.] Just a room with some people in it and a mirror’ (p. 6), while Shaun wonders whether it’s about

art itself (which is a set of illusions and tricks and artifices within life), or life itself (which is a set of illusions and tricks and artifices within a consciousness that is trying to understand life through perceptions and dreams and art)[.] (p. 6)

Posed so early in the text, the questions that the painting raises for Shaun seem to match those of the reader in relation to Orbital, this book about nothing, or about art, or about life.

Perhaps, we think, if we can answer the teacher’s question then we can learn how we’re supposed to read Orbital.

Art that saves

In my reading, Italian astronaut Pietro helps us to solve the question. When, towards the end of the book, Pietro sees the painting on a postcard and tries to answer the question posed by Shaun’s wife on the back of the card. Shaun’s wife has pronounced: ‘Welcome to the labyrinth of mirrors that is human life.‘ (p. 104). But Pietro’s answer is different, again: ‘It’s the dog’. (p. 104) This object, that Shaun hadn’t previously given a ‘second glance’ (p. 104) now takes all of his attention.

Bear with me, because I don’t think the dog is necessarily the answer to the question. More that, as we follow Shaun’s train of thought, Pietro’s ‘comment has made Shaun see a different painting altogether to the one he’d seen before’ (p. 105). The point is that the initial question—What is the subject of the painting?—is the wrong one.

The focus on the ‘subject’—the topic, the thing that gives meaning to the painting, the thing that gathers and coheres the remainder—belies the incomprehensible meaning of the painting. Instead, I think that Shaun’s renewed relationship with the painting after Pietro’s comment is what merits our focus.

Likewise, it should free us as readers to read Orbital however we want.

We could focus on the death of Chie’s mother and her grief. We could think about Nell’s relatively new husband in Ireland forging a life for himself. We could worry with Pietro for his friend the Filipino fisherman and his family who are in the path of the typhoon.

And, more importantly, we could focus on how each of these subjects encourages an altered state of understanding and reading of the rest of the narratives, of other focuses of the novel.

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1. Samantha Harvey, Orbital (Jonathan Cape, 2023), p. 1. ↩︎