By Amy Dale -
Orbital was today announced as the 2024 Booker Prize winner. The judges said "our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share." Here is the Journal's review from October 2024.
Novels set within the confines of a single day often offer an exhausting reading experience: the scrutiny upon every skerrick of character development and the unfolding of so many large and small events in a compressed timeframe: the minutiae of a morning bathroom routine meets a deliberation on what is the point of being alive at all.
The most famous modern example is James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in 1922. The novel follows Leopold Bloom through a single day in Dublin (now celebrated as ‘Bloomsday’, 16 June). Joyce’s genius use of stream-of-consciousness and detailed exploration of everyday life serves up a profound slice of human consciousness and the urban experience; that is, if you are able to finish it.
Three years later, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925, depicts a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares for a party in post-World War I and Spanish Flu ravaged London. Woolf’s narrative style mines the inner lives of her characters, revealing their past and present psychological states, all while capturing the social and emotional nuances of a single day’s worth of interactions.
In Samantha Harvey’s small but mighty Orbital, the single day is told through the multiple orbits experienced by six astronauts, rotating in their spacecraft in “Earth’s fabulous and improbable backyard … in this new day they’ll circle the earth sixteen times. They’ll see sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets, sixteen days and sixteen nights.”
The six people, from nations spanning the US, Italy, Japan, Britain and two cosmonauts from Russia, perform their morning exercises, eat the carefully-packaged food pouches, undertake their experiments in measuring meteorological data, document their observations, and try to get their necessary sleep, all while continents and oceans spin and move underneath them.
Individually the astronauts are also grieving a parent, missing, or considering leaving a partner, and contemplate whether being so far removed from Earth makes them feel more or less tethered to humanity. The precariousness of their mission is also not lost upon them. When they receive news that a new crew is heading to the moon, and that their position in an international space station has become “yesterday’s news”, one of them remarks “better yesterday’s news than tomorrow’s … if you’re an astronaut you’d rather not ever be news.”
Orbital marks the first time Harvey has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, after two previous longlistings. In placing it among the six titles that will seek the prize, the judges described the book as “compact yet expansive [and] a love letter to our planet.”
A work that shines as both poetry and prose, Orbital is a stunning read that can be devoured in a single day – and what a glorious one it would be.
