This slender, gleaming novel depicts a day in the life of six astronauts at the International Space Station – but a day isn’t a day for a crew orbiting Earth at more than 17,000 miles an hour. Space ‘takes their 24 hours and throws 16 days and nights at them in return’.
Weaving a line of philosophical enquiry through her luminous prose has become something of a trademark for Samantha Harvey, who probed the elasticity of time through a portrayal of Alzheimer’s disease in her prize-winning debut The Wilderness and, in All is Song, transported Socrates to the 21st century. In Orbital, her sixth book, she explores time again, especially the dissonance between how we experience it bodily – insisted upon by mission control’s prescriptive schedule enforcing diurnal rhythms – and mentally. ‘The mind goes free within the first week’, leaving the astronauts struggling to gauge the length of a minute.
As the division of day and night is complicated by space travel, so are Earth’s geographical and political partitions: ‘Continents run into each other like overgrown gardens… the Earth feels – not small, but almost endlessly connected, an epic poem of flowing verses.’
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