From up above, the Earth looks like a “suspended jewel” of blue and green against the black, blank canvas of space. Six astronauts – Anton, Pietro, Roman, Shaun, Chie, and Nell – have a “privileged anxious view” of our planet. They watch a typhoon approaching the “scarily frail” Philippines, the continent of Europe that is “outlined with fine precision”, humanity that hides in daylight and makes its presence known by illuminating the night, and various other markers of our existence. They are confined but alive in space, and the immense distance from the home planet lets the astronauts ponder over the more intangible facets of humanity. For instance, when there is no ground under our feet and free oxygen to breathe, whom do we become?
A longing for home
Samantha Harvey’s slim novel Orbital is set in a day of these astronauts’ lives as they circle the Earth several times over to observe meteorological phenomena and conduct scientific experiments. Besides their crewmates, the only other living creatures onboard are some unsuspecting mice most of whom will perish during the descent. From their vantage position, they see the sun “set” and “rise” over various countries while they follow their own independent – and confusing – 24-hour clock. Like on Earth, they try to get eight hours of sleep, work when awake, exercise to save their muscles from atrophying, eat food and drink beverages from sachets, urinate and excrete, and breathe each other’s air. The forced closeness gives rise to natural human emotions – despite the irony of the unnatural setting – of vexation, affection, and even lust. But the emotion that reigns supreme is longing.
When Chie receives the news of her mother’s passing, the rest of the day is spent remembering her life. A survivor of America’s war on Japan, she recollects her mother’s anecdotes about the atomic bomb landing in her country and its absolute destruction. An unassuming woman of little means, she was fascinated by man’s landing on the moon – an event that made a great impact on her and inadvertently prepared her daughter Chie for a career in space exploration. As her crewmates offer their condolences, she is careful to not shed tears for any stray droplet of liquid can wreak havoc in their spacecraft. The wonderment of being in space is only second to the immensity of her grief.
The civilised savages
As the spacecraft makes its 16 orbits around the Earth, we see the planet as not just a vessel of life but also as a wound of human greed and violence. The distance offers a perspective that we are just “windblown leaves” as opposed to the wind which is self-determining and omnipotent. An aspect of nature worthy of worship. In one instance, the astronauts while watching the typhoon approach The Philippines think of themselves as fortune tellers who though able to see the future are helpless to prevent it. Lives will be lost, forests will be ravished but they cannot do anything except sound a warning. Man invented fire but there is little that we have been able to bend to our will – “We’re a few flint-strikes ahead of everything else,” reminds Harvey. Apes that know how to light a fire, that’s all. Yet the primitiveness of our existence and impotency against the future has not stopped us from waging wars and polluting the planet and space, too. From the darkness, the astronauts can see how coastlines have been altered, the discolouration of water bodies, the flood-swollen rivers, the vanishing urban mangrove forests, mountains of plastic waste – almost as if we have discovered another habitable planet and this one doesn’t matter anymore.
The indistinct borders and our faceless presence also force important questions about the increasingly elusive world peace that once seemed attainable. “Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? It’s not a fond wish but a fretful demand,” muses the novel – a thought that also strikes many of us when we are a few miles above the ground in a passenger aeroplane. The little regard for human life and that of plants and animals has cost us heavily. Politics forces an upper hand. Even the veneer of civility is not enough to prevent the terror humans evoke in each other and other living creatures. Time and again, in the seas and the skies, man has proven to be the most savage beast of all. These become moments of not just reckoning, but an acknowledgement of our frailty too. The desire to stop at nothing to be at the top has endangered our very own lives and despite the wars we have fought in the name of peace and progress, we have been unable to conquer something as fundamental and primitive as death.
The restrictive life on spacecraft gives rise to the possibility of robots replacing human beings on these missions. Keeping humans alive in space is tough, robots will make the job easier. Their findings might be more precise too. The need to not feed or manufacture oxygen for them might cut down expenses too. But what good is it to cast out a thing into space that has “no eyes to see and not heart [with] fear or exult in it”? – an important, urgent question in the age of artificial intelligence. Not just in the creation of the arts, but what good is a being that feels no joy or wonder even in scientific discoveries? The first fire was created by apes rubbing two flints against each other, and the first sparks had filled them with awe, terror, and excitement about what they had created. In the end, man’s presence in space is a long, progressive, inevitable journey from apehood propelled by a thirst for knowledge and the inability to not know when to stop.
The third-person narrative voice in Orbital often hijacks the dialogues and thoughts of its characters resulting in the six astronauts lumping into one – each indistinguishable from the other. The end result of being in a metallic vessel for months on end. Much like the astronauts, Harvey throws the reader into space as she meticulously describes Earth through the spacecraft windows and the laborious days of those who undertake space exploration. But unlike the astronauts, the reader’s feet are on the ground and the images one conjures up in their mind suspend the reader in a state of half-belief where one finds it impossible to be tethered to reality.
To perceive the planet as both a jewel in space and a wasteland of human evolution stirs feelings of unease as one slowly – again – comes to terms that we are immaterial to the resolve of the winds that will uproot human settlements, tides that will swallow farmlands, tectonic plates that will part to engulf cities, and fires that will burn civilisations to ash. Harvey’s ability to oscillate between the magnificent and inconsequent, the grotesque and the beautiful, and the preventable and inevitable creates a supremely stylish novel where the evocative, wondrous prose encompasses within itself the grandness of human ambition and the smallness of our existence.
Orbital, Samantha Harvey, Vintage.
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