The Booker Prize — as defined by the foundation of the same name — is “the leading literary award in the English speaking world,” and it’s awarded to “the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland.” On Nov. 12 of this year, the Booker Prize was announced. It was presented to a novel lauded in a unanimous decision by the panel: a novel with “capaciousness and resonance,” one boasting “beauty and ambition.”
That novel is Orbital by Samantha Harvey, a story tracking the lives of six astronauts as they hurtle through space for 16 days. Upon finishing the book, however, none of these descriptions came to mind. If I had only read page one of Orbital, then I may agree with the panel’s decision and certainty in naming it the Booker Prize winner. But after reading the 206 pages proceeding after page one, I’m befuddled by how the panel could have made that decision, much less a unanimous one.
At first glance, Orbital is a hot first date. Harvey wields an obvious command of language, which she sustains throughout the novel to write sprawling and stunning sentences. But like the ditzy blonde or dumb jock archetype, upon spending more time with Orbital, I found it to lack any substance. It was just flowery language or a pretty face to look at. It’s often the case that a work’s language won’t meet the task of what it’s saying. For Harvey, however, it’s the opposite. Her idea doesn’t meet the task of her language — all bark, no bite; talking loud, not saying much.
The only conflict throughout the novel — if you can even call it that — was a typhoon that the astronauts observed approaching closer to land. It was larger than the meteorologists on Earth had anticipated, and after viewing the photos the astronauts sent back to Earth, they renamed it a super typhoon. The buildup to the super typhoon’s touchdown could be called “subtle,” but I believe that’s granting it too much credit.
It was more like the grating, tinny nag of a fly somewhere in the room that you can’t locate: It’s always present, and the process of finding it goes on for way too long. But like a quick splat with a fly swatter, as soon as the super typhoon did touch land, the novel’s fixation with it was over in an instant. If you mapped the novel’s plot on Freytag’s Pyramid, then the climax would be as dramatic as the highest point in Kansas.
The novel’s true protagonist is space. Harvey admits this, stating in an interview, “I want to write a space pastoral.” Even considering this, her six astronauts read as critically underdeveloped. As the panel grants, “everyone and no one is the subject.” Emphasis should be placed on the “no one.” For any story, it would be a daring maneuver to introduce six characters equally vying for attention — or lack thereof — yet Harvey throws caution to the wind, doing just that. While reading, I found it impossible to keep these characters straight in my mind when all I was given were intermittent mentions nestled between descriptions of space, daily tasks and sparse moments of characterization for the other characters.
By the end, each character was granted perhaps one or two facts that distinguished them from the rest: Shaun met his wife in a history class while they were learning about Las Meninas; Chie’s mother died while she was in space (also, Chie likes making lists) and so on. The characters were static, two-dimensional and lacked complexity. While you could argue that this was intentional and aimed to highlight the insignificance of people compared to space, that could have been accomplished better by a tasteful omission of characterization rather than a half-baked attempt. I would rather have learned nothing about the characters, letting my mind consider the meaning of this absence or materializing my own content from it, than be given facts so few, small and insignificant that they feel insulting to the reader’s integrity.
The reader learns less about the characters themselves than they learn about the tasks the characters have to complete every day on the space station. This only compounded the feeling that Orbital was like an overstuffed research paper on space — its author unwilling to skimp with any edits that may hide the work they put into reading source material for their project.
An ugly reaction takes place when you combine the novel’s purple prose with its lack of action. You get a work of literature like cotton candy. It’s sugary, it’s sweet and it’s nice in the moment, but ultimately, it’s devoid of any sustenance. Like cotton candy hitting your tongue, it’s gone in an instant.
Orbital is a novel that will not stick with me because there seems to be no larger message. As a reader, I believe larger messages must be tied to some tangible action, which Orbital lacked. With some exceptions, the theme has difficulty attaching itself to free-floating words that are written to sit there and look pretty. While reading Orbital, it felt nice to let Harvey’s sentences wash over my mind like a hot shower; over time, however, more and more of that same hot water began to feel scalding, leaving the skin of my mind pruned and raw.
One of the concepts Orbital commonly employs is beauty. Through the lens of space, the novel questions what beauty is: something or the lack of something. After reading the novel and considering beauty without discussing space, I can define it as simplicity. If beauty is not fully in simplicity, then it exists somewhere in the space between simplicity and intricacy. Like yin and yang or highs and lows, one cannot exist without the other, and both are mutually defined by their comparison. Orbital is a purely intricate novel — at first, this may sound desirable. Truly, however, this is what keeps it from ever being beautiful, even if the language it overuses may be.
