The 2024 Booker Prize winner – is it out of this world?
By Lucy Hughes
If you’re anything like me, then you’re probably tangentially interested in the big yearly literary prizes; who gets them, who almost gets them, do the coffee shop ones really count? If you’re very much like me, then you probably don’t keep up with them enough to know who gets them before it’s months after the fact and you’re hearing about the results from a rando on the internet who sits in front of an IKEA bookshelf covered in fairy lights for a living.
All that to say, I’m late to the party with Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital. Orbital is a short novel about six astronauts(/cosmonauts) on the International Space Station over the course of a day in orbit. It’s about the earth; it’s about space; it’s about us; it doesn’t really have much of a plot, but it’s very pretty.
The bulk of the novel is sweeping descriptions of space or the earth seen from space, and the languid and syrupy prose Harvey uses suits this. For all its plotlessness, the book is punctuated by moments of humanity and vignettes of life back on earth. A typhoon moves across the surface of the earth, another spacecraft launches, friends, and relatives of the astronauts play out their lives and deaths. The novel as a whole seems very preoccupied with the idea of entanglement and detachment. The astronauts feel detached from Earth and from their families, but are always looking back towards home and family.
The narrative voice obsessively returns to descriptions of the surface of the earth, glimpses of its life. One of the most overt ways Harvey explores this enmeshed and dissociative feeling is through the entanglement of her characters. It’s quite hard to tell who’s who at times, whose wife it was who gave him the postcard, who cried over the Challenger disaster as a child – the astronauts blur into one another within the pages of the book and in their minds, and yet they hardly know one another. Obsessed with the beauty of the earth and the psychology of space travel, the book, and by extension Harvey, doesn’t ignore what a dirty and political business space exploration actually is. The impacts of political climate apathy are visible from space, and a layer of junk sits around the earth from previous missions, while the on-craft toilets are separated by nationality.
I think this book is both timeless and very much of its time, which is fitting seeing how Harvey plays with time throughout the book. Timeless because we will always be on a rock floating through space, trying to get to other rocks floating through space, and of its time because of that uncertain, teetering feeling of climate anxiety that creeps in at its edges, and because of that thick blanket of dissociative existentialism laid over the prose, and over our current collective mood.
My feelings on this novel are a little bit mixed. It’s an ambitious work, and the sixteen quotes on the cover aren’t lying – it is a beautifully written book. That being said, a Goodreads review of it I happened to see while logging it on my Reading Challenge (don’t judge me, it’s good motivation) described it as feeling like a drawn-out writing exercise at times, and I can see that. In short, would I recommend the latest winner of the Booker Prize? If you can weather one hundred and thirty-six pages of metaphorical descriptions of NASA promotional images, then yes. If you’re already the kind of person for whom one hundred and thirty-six pages of space metaphorsounds like a fun time, then this may be your new favourite book. Personally, I liked it! It was pretty, and occasionally very moving, and my appreciation of it will probably only continue to grow the longer I spend thinking about it, which is always a very good sign.
If you would like to boldly go and read this one small step for Booker Prize-winners, one giant leap for space prose, you can find it in your favourite bookshop now. You can also learn more about the author, the prize, and the book’s writing at https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/everything-you-need-to-know-about-orbital-booker-prize-2024-winner. Happy reading!
