“Orbital”

I can see why Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital” won the 2024 Booker Prize: it’s a sustained piece of bravura writing. However…

… too soon it started to feel like a travelog, a geography lesson. I stopped caring about whether the spacecraft was orbiting over Kazakstan, Alaska, or Milton Keynes; the places and countries – and the images of those places and countries (a consistency of pin-pricks of light, or darkness, or slashes of colour) – began to blend into one almost meaningless mass.

I wanted to know more about the people in the space station; not just their lives before, but their lives together. Months in a confined space would have generated such mutual stories, tensions, emotions – but there was nowhere near enough of the human for me.

Perhaps that wasn’t the point of the book, though; perhaps it was supposed to be about the Earth, its uniqueness, its potential – but I think Harvey missed a trick with the people-story…

Reading list

P.S. “Orbital” getting bombed on ‘Good Reads’ because it contains a Russian character says so much more about the people who criticise the book than the book itself…