Samantha Harvey has won the prestigious Booker prize for her fifth novel, Orbital. At a slim 144 pages, it details the day-to-day life on board an international space station. It’s been described as ‘ravishingly beautiful’ by The New York Times and has garnered similarly glowing praise from almost all literary critics who come across it.
But there is no better example of the literary fad of style over substance and flash-in-the-pan mediocrity than Harvey’s Orbital. Its most tremendous success is its use of perspective, which it hammers in with relentless insistence. “Look,” the book shouts, “from this point of view, high above everything, space and time take on new meanings! And we should be worried about climate change!”
Harvey doesn’t leverage this technique for anything other than asking the reader to utter “whoa, man” on every second page, like a stoned teenager looking up to the stars. There is the thinnest veneer of plot (one of the astronauts loses a family member back home), but Harvey abandons that by halfway through.
Orbital is a long, ponderous poem. The prose is beautiful, and almost any section read in isolation demonstrates a writer with immense talent. But the book is dangerously over-hyped. Like many Booker Prize-winners, it is destined for the forgotten bookshelves of literary critics and only the most hardcore of collectors (anyone still talking about The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida from 2022? Or The Promise from 2021?).
It is interesting to watch the divide in opinions between traditional literary critics and internet influencers. The BookTube and BookTok communities, generally made up of younger readers diligently reading trending books, have panned Orbital. Other books on the Booker Prize shortlist were more universally adored.
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Make no mistake, Orbital is a fine novel in technique and you could spend an afternoon reading plenty of worse books. Just don’t expect the next great literary masterpiece when you open the front cover. You’ll be satisfied if you’re content with a meandering meditation on time and space.
Orbital, Samatha Harvey
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN:9781529922936
Format: Paperback
Pages: 144pp
Publication date: 3 September 2024
RRP: $22.99
