ORBITAL, by Samantha Harvey
Samantha Harvey features two famous artworks in her poetic fifth novel, “Orbital.” One is Diego Velázquez’s enduring 1656 masterpiece, “Las Meninas.” The second is a 1969 photograph taken by the astronaut Michael Collins of the lunar module Eagle, carrying Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong back from the moon, with Earth in the background. Collins is literally the only person in the world not in the image.
The contrast between painting and photograph couldn’t be greater. Velázquez shifts the typical narrative of the royal portrait away from the monarch and toward the titular ladies-in-waiting, the hangers-on and court players, the royal dog, even himself. A puzzle of perspective, it teems with life. Collins’s photograph is comparatively straightforward, incorporating every soul on Earth but showcasing none. It is as impersonal as space itself.
The spirit of Harvey’s novel partakes of both. “Orbital” is set inside a space station 250 miles above Earth as it laps the planet at 17,500 miles per hour. “On this orbit, orbit two of today’s 16,” Harvey writes, the crew of six men and women “traverse the earth one whole round and see barely a trace of human or animal life.”
These protagonists operate the craft and conduct experiments and otherwise fulfill the space station’s mission. They are also permitted a rarefied and abstracted view of our troubled planet, reframing the subject much as Velásquez did with the court of King Philip IV. Current events and national borders are trees lost to the forest, and Harvey uses this distance to reflect on what we miss when we stare too closely, bitterly, at our share of the bark.
“Orbital” shifts frequently between (sometimes speculative) points of view — an alien’s, a robot’s, a prehistoric seafarer’s — brief and partial perspectives united by a lyrical narrator whose exultant voice riffs rhapsodically on all that strikes its fancy.
The book is ravishingly beautiful. It is also nearly free of plot. No alien race invades. No sentient planet turns people mad. The technology behaves. The astronauts are consummate professionals. One is described as the heart of the ship, another its hands, a third its conscience. No trial tests these claims, and no event comes along to reverse or strengthen them. “Orbital” is an assiduous day-in-the-life account of characters whose main business is to serve the riff — on deep space, cosmic time, climate change, the meaning of life, the existence of God, the nature of progress. Always passionate and often moving, these riffs invariably come untethered from the characters who inspire them, and lack the mole of mediated thought.
Individuals are further effaced by their collective, almost mystical harmonizing. In spite of the cultural, political and linguistic barriers among them, the crew align body and soul, sharing associations, dreams and even the same sense of déjà vu. “They have talked before about a feeling they often have, a feeling of merging,” Harvey writes. “That they are not quite distinct from one another, nor from the spaceship.”
Harvey suggests that this mind-meld is a function of the craft itself: “They are a choreographing of movements and functions of the ship’s body as it enacts its perfect choreography of the planet.” Parts, in other words, no different from gimbals and thrusters. This unity offers a utilitarian, and utopian, alternative to the partisan bickering and tribal warfare back on Earth, suggesting that from way out in space, survival doesn’t divide us, it bonds us.
In reality, of course, life in space is surely still life. In that way “Orbital” resembles Collins’s photograph: It contains the world but fails to reflect it. Harvey lavishes the planet with her considerable rhetorical gifts, but the recklessness and miseries we know at pavement level have been scrubbed from her observation deck. It is all angels above, devils below.
But then, those transporting riffs, those fine rhapsodies! The novel’s refreshing view of Earth restores some of life’s original magic, calling to mind a third, unmentioned image — any one of last year’s Webb telescope photographs, which trounce despair by returning the stargazer to innocent spectacle. Sometimes, wonder and beauty suffice.
ORBITAL | By Samantha Harvey | Grove | 207 pp. | $27
