Consider your life on Earth – your relationship with wind, rain, sun, trees, flowers, birds, and bugs; the sensation of gathering darkness as night falls around you or thunderheads roll in across the sky; the feeling of water on your skin as you run through a rainstorm or wade into the ocean, your toes sinking into cool sand.
Set entirely within a hermetically-sealed satellite orbiting Earth, Samantha Harvey’s Booker-Prize-winning Orbital, a “space pastoral,” achieves many things, but most especially the overwhelming sense of wonder at the singularity of the planet we call home.
In short chapters packed with poetic descriptions and philosophical musings, Harvey logs 16 Earth orbits in a 24-hour period through the points of view of six astronauts from different countries who observe Earth through a portal window, its shifting beauty and silent drama on full display below. Due to the speed of their travel, they witness sunrise and sunset over different continents every 90 minutes: “Now there’s Santiago on South America’s approaching coast in a cloud-hazed burn of gold… their craft tracks east, eastward and down towards Patagonia where the lurch of a far-off aurora domes the horizon in neon.”
Throughout their journey, the orbiters are weightless in more ways than one. Learning of her mother’s death while in space, Chie explains the exhilaration of being, at least for a period of time, emotionally untethered: “If she could stay in orbit for the rest of her life all would be well. It’s only when she goes back that her mother is dead… when you’re orbiting you’re impact-proof and nothing can touch you.” Although they think often about their lives on earth – their entanglements, achievements, and losses – these travelers don’t really want to go home. At least, not now, not yet. Home is where the heart is, yes, but also the hurt.
In the end, though, Earth, as Robert Frost wrote, is the right place for love. It is also, to our knowledge, the only place for love. Read while in another country with unfamiliar landscapes over the winter holiday, Orbital ultimately filled me with wonder and sorrow for our planet and for all who inhabit, explore, celebrate, destroy, and push beyond it.