Samantha Harvey - Orbital
- Publisher – Vintage
- Published – Out now
- Price – £9.99 paperback | £5.99 Kindle
Sometimes abandoning a book hurts. Even before I'd heard any hype about it, and before it appeared on the Ursula K Le Guin Prize shortlist, I'd seen Orbital in bookshops several times and was very interested in it. I really wanted to like this one.
Here's the blurb:
A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts--from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan--have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate.
Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet.
I love a slow, contemplative book but there's a very fine line between slow and boring, and unfortunately Orbital didn't quite manage to walk it for me. I struggled to separate the characters, who all had the same voice, and close to halfway through I realised that I was bored of reading very long sentences with no variation in rhythm or tone of the language. We spend a lot of time pondering the distant beauty of the globe as the station makes its endless loops but it all just becomes a little repetitive and flat for my tastes. I didn't get any sense that the next 100+ pages were going to be any different, and I ultimately decided to stop reading at around the 45% mark.
Maybe the slow, only fractionally-changing repetition is the point, but this wasn't for me.
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