Samantha Harvey, one of the most consistently surprising contemporary British novelists, becomes something like the cosmic artificer of our era with her slim, enormous novel Orbital, which imaginatively constructs the day-to-day lives of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Orbital is the strangest and most magical of projects, not least because it’s barely what most people would call a novel but performs the kind of task that only a novel could dare. It’s barely a novel because it barely tells a plotted set of human stories, and the stories it does tell barely interact with one another....But this minimal fictionality is not really the point; it’s merely the ransom paid to the genre in order to resemble the novelistic. The point is everything else: the almost unimaginable unworldliness of the situation ... The real point of Orbital is the demonstration of how a writer might capture this spectacular strangeness in language adequate to the spectacle. And how she might do so with fitting surplus, in ways that surpass the more orderly permissions of journalism and nonfictional prose. Harvey, writing like a kind of Melville of the skies, finds that fitting surplus again and again.
Harvey’s meditative novel portraying life aboard a spacecraft contains on almost every page sentences so gorgeous that you want to put down the book in awe ... Harvey, the author of four previous novels, expertly compensates for the absence of a conventional plot by immersing us in the drama of the stars ... All too plausible undercurrents in Harvey’s magnificent river of words. Yet Orbital is ultimately a thrilling book, filled with marvel at the beauty of creation made palpable in bravura descriptions.
Poetic ... The book is ravishingly beautiful. It is also nearly free of plot ... It contains the world but fails to reflect it. Harvey lavishes the planet with her considerable rhetorical gifts, but the recklessness and miseries we know at pavement level have been scrubbed from her observation deck. It is all angels above, devils below.
Harvey manages, in taking readers along to the final frontier, to remind us less of our essential loneliness and more of our mutual dependence ... A complete novel, all the way to its conclusion. With a few tiny strokes of foreshadowing and a few lovely paragraphs of description, Harvey manages to bring readers back down to Earth, astounded that they’ve traveled so far in such a short period of time, having finished their own orbit through the realms of her rich imagination.
Philosophically motivated lyrical ... The characters’ thoughts mix and flow with the colours and light. Beauty doesn’t come from goodness but from aliveness ... Sumptuously written.
Very much a work driven by language, so traditionalists be warned: there’s scant plot or action ... Harvey’s beautiful and soulful vision distracts us from that truth for the duration of this slim but affecting prose poem of a book.
The strength of this book lies in Harvey’s stunning and rhythmic descriptions of this constantly unravelling world ... Her book may lack traditional plot, but the beauty of the prose engages the reader fully and, overall, this is an uplifting book.
One of the most beautiful and poignant novels I have read this year. It seems wholly necessary that a novel about the fragility and glory of our mutual and natural habitat, the Earth, is not even set on it ... There is something profoundly compelling about this short novel ... Reminded me of music ... Part of what gives this novel its drive is a sense of closely observed strangeness that reveals paradox ... Weightless.
A slim but radiant novel of space, exploration, and meaning-making ... Harvey gives readers a powerful novel that, in less than 200 pages, manages to explore questions of philosophy and religion, faith, existence, meaning-making, art, grief, and gratitude, just to name a few. In showing one day in the lives of just six individuals, she probes deep into the human experience as it teeters between the profound and the mundane ... Luscious and lyrical.
