“Orbital” is one of those books that had me both totally engaged and uncomfortably bumping along.

It’s long on style, language, symbols, and vision and almost totally lacking in plot.  Harvey takes us up to the International Space Station where four astronauts (American, English, Japanese, and Italian) and two Russian cosmonauts have been living and working in close quarters for several months.  During their nine month stints in space they will conduct experiments, work out two hours every day to limit the damage that weightlessness does to bones and muscles, take measurements and photographs of the stars and earth, and otherwise log data as the ISS spins through space 250 miles above the earth.  The book is organized around the 16 orbits the ISS makes each earth day, ascending and descending as its orbit crisscrosses the rotating earth. We meet Shaun, Nell, Chie, and Pietro as well as Anton and Roman and learn some details about their families (especially Chie whose mother dies while she’s in orbit), their early childhood fascination with space, and their feelings while spinning above the world.  We also learn of a supertyphoon they observe as it bears down on the Philippines.

The theme of the book appears to be the fragility and uniqueness of our earth as it suffers the devastation of human interventions.  The possiblity of other worlds, the Moon and Mars as escape routes for a species destined to become extinct is explored.  The Vanguard satellites travelling billions of miles with their phonograph recordings of music, language, and earth sounds are described.  For me, the most interesting portion was the comparison of earth’s history to a calendar.  If the creation of the universe 14.5 billion years ago were to be arrayed on January 1st,the Milky Way would have formed 2B years later on March 16th and the earth wouldn’t have appeared until early September.  Life sprung forth on September 14th, 4B years ago and man would have taken the stage only at mid-afternoon on New Year’s Eve, well after the dinosaurs had their five days of glory in late December.  In the closing second of the cosmic year, there’s “industrialisation, fascism, the combustion engine, Augusto Pinochet, Nikola Tesla, Frida Kahlo, Malala Yousafzai, Alexander Hamilton, Viv Richards, Lucky Luciano, Ada Lovelace….”. This list of human accomplishments, individuals, and events goes on for three pages in a rather spectacular agglomeration of the important and the trivial.

So since I love this kind of metaphor and since the book is beautifully written, what got in the way of my loving this book?  It was a sense of impending doom, no doubt intended by the author.  After introducing us to these six wonderful people and allowing us to live with them for a day, I had the feeling the whole things was going to explode or otherwise come to a bad end. I was wrong, and I’m grateful the book ended on a somber but positive note.

The other issue I had was the writing which danced back and forth across the line of beauty and sentimental.  I’ll have to come down on the beauty side.  That decision agrees with the review written by my professor, James Wood in the December 18, 2023 ‘New Yorker’ in which he refers to Harvey’s book as “slim, enormous…the strangest and most magical of projects.” He concludes his enthusiastic review as follows: “Samantha Harvey has written a magnificently strange and utterly original book that makes it just a little easier to believe in that particular miracle. When it comes to belief, isn’t that quite a lot to be getting on with?”