whatcathyread

A couple of months ago I was in Madrid with my friend, Cath. It was a joy to visit Spain with her not least because she’s a fluent Spanish-speaker and knows a lot about the culture.

In the Prado we lingered over the museum’s most famous artwork Las Meninas (the Ladies-in Waiting) by Velazquez, which puzzled and captivated me in equal measure. Is the subject of the painting really the ladies-in waiting, after whom it is named, or is it the golden-haired princess in the middle of their group? Or Velazquez, who painted himself into the picture, standing at his easel, painting the King and Queen (who we only see reflected in a mirror behind him). What of the mysterious man in the lighted doorway?

Later that same month, whether by chance or synchronicity, I began reading Orbital and on page six, there was this: “There was a lesson at school about the painting Les Meninas, when Shaun was fifteen. It was about how the painting disoriented its viewer and left them not knowing what it was they were looking at.”

Shaun is staring at a postcard of Las Meninas given to him by his wife. They were classmates, and on the back of the postcard she’s written a precis of that art lesson. Oh, and he’s in his quarters, in a spacecraft rotating the Earth, the sole American in a crew of six astronauts / cosmonauts.

Did I not mention that?

Shaun’s crewmates are: Roman (Russian), Anton (Russian), Chie (Japanese), Pietro (Italian) and Nell (English). Four men and two women. “Six of them in a great H of metal hanging above the earth…They will each be here for nine months or so…nine months of this sardine living, nine months of this earthward gaping, then back to the patient planet below.”

Despite its space-setting, Orbital is not a sci-fi novel, at least not in the traditional sense. There are no aliens, no close encounters; no-one dies – apart from Chie’s mother, of old age, at home in Japan (that’s not a spoiler, by the way, we learn about her death on page eight).

The action unfolds over twenty-four hours, during which time the spacecraft completes sixteen orbits of the Earth; the novel is structured into twenty-two chapters defined by those orbits: “Orbit minus 1”, “Orbit 1 ascending”, “Orbit 1, into orbit 2”, “Orbit 3 ascending” etc. It’s a routine mission. They’re there to collect data and conduct experiments; mostly they simply look at the planet. Not sci-fi, then; more a love-letter to Earth.

“When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but … 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.” Earth IS Heaven – or has the potential to be.

Early in the book, comparison is drawn between the precarious nature of life in a spacecraft (“this fact of living in a complex life-support machine and the prospect that it could, instantaneously, all end – a failure in any part of the machine”) and the precariousness of life itself (“all beings are living in life-support machines commonly called bodies and all of these will fail eventually”). Earth, too, is a complex life-support machine (“We couldn’t survive a second without its grace”), a fact emphasised by item number one on the day’s “Of Extra-Special Interest list”, namely “the typhoon moving over the Western Pacific towards Indonesia and the Philippines, which seems suddenly to have gathered force.”

It’s clear Harvey has done her research; there’s even a map with the orbits overlayed onto it and she acknowledges her gratitude to NASA and ESA. There is, though, an inherent difficulty in the subject matter and twenty-four hour timescale. In one sense a lot happens (“in this new day they’ll circle the earth sixteen times. They’ll see sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets, sixteen days and sixteen nights.”); in another sense nothing much happens at all. In between watching Earth, they eat; they exercise. They monitor their experiments (Pietro has his microbes, Shaun his cress, Chie and Nell their lab-mice, Roman and Anton their heart-cell cultures). They clean what needs cleaning, maintain what needs maintaining; e-mail their families. There is magnificence but there is also mundanity.

And if you’re writing about a twenty-four hour period, your protagonists need to sleep. In Orbital the astronauts sleep through the first chapter and for most of the last six.

Ok, ok, I realise the astronauts can be read as representing the ‘developed’ world generally (their nationalities, their sexes). They observe the Earth “shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything”, knowing they are part of the problem “their rocket whose boosters at lift-off burn the fuel of a million cars” but are powerless to change anything, the “terrible destruction of the typhoon”, for instance. And, yes, I realise their routine activities juxtaposed against a major meteorological catastrophe is kind of the point. They’re fiddling while Rome burns.

And yet…if your protagonists are asleep for 20% of the book (yawn!) it does tend to make the story drag. Orbital only runs to 136 pages (Penguin Randon House / Vintage paperback version), more a novella than a novel, but it still feels too long.

But, hey, why not give it a go? Orbital was winner of the 2024 Booker Prize.

Rating: ** Worth reading

PS Pietro thinks the subject of Las Meninas is the dog. “The only thing in the painting that could be called vaguely free.”