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Book review

Orbital by Samantha Harvey 2023

Rotating about the Earth in their spacecraft, they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same, dreams of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses. Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.

Orbital, which won the 2024 Booker Prize, follows a day in the lives of six astronauts in low-earth orbit on the International Space Station. Italian, Russian, British, American and Japanese astronauts spend their day in a mixture of the mundane – monitoring routine experiments on the behaviour of microbes and mice in space, documenting their bodily functions, eating, drinking, sleeping – and the extraordinary, watching the vastness of space and the earth pinwheeling round. We learn the backstory of each astronaut and how they came to be on the ISS. Simultaneously another mission takes off from earth, this time going back to the moon.

The novel is a poem to the beauty of the earth and its fragile improbability. The prose is extraordinarily lyrical – I could fill this review with examples of the author’s wonderful descriptions of earth as it passes by the space station’ s windows:

There’s the first dumbfounding view of Earth, a hunk of tourmaline, No, a cantaloupe, an eye, lilac, orange, almond, mauve, white, magenta, bruised, textured, shellacked splendour.

and

As they traverse south, the colours change, the browns lighter, the palette less sombre, a range of greens, from the dark of the mountainsides to the emerald of river plains to the teal of the sea. The rich purplish green of the vast Nile Delta. Brown becomes peach, becomes plum: Africa beneath them in its abstract batik. The Nile is a spillage of royal blue ink.

and

Down over the arrowing peninsula of Dakar, crossing the equator, and in the closing minutes of day, the lights of Brazzaville and Kinshasa on either side of the Congo River, tepid in the dusk. Blue becomes mauve becomes indigo becomes black, and night-time down southern Africa in one. Gone is the paint-splattered, ink-leached, crumpled-satin, crumbled-pastel overflowing-fruit-bowl continent of chaotic perfection, the continent of salt pans and red sedimented floodplain and the nerve networks of splaying rivers and mountains that bubble up from the plains, green and velvety like mould growth. Gone is a continent, and here is another sheer widow’s veil of starstruck night.

This is some of the finest descriptive writing I have read in a very long time and I make no apology for quoting it at such length.

Orbital is not just a prose poem on the beauty of the earth. No novel, however slight (the text is less than 140 pages long) could sustain that as its sole theme. It touches on a number of other topics. One of the astronauts is asked to provide a response to the question “With this new era of space travel, how are we writing the future of humanity?” (this is with reference to the new journey to the moon, not the low-orbit space station which is very much showing its age), and the response offered by one of his fellow astronauts is “With the gilded pens of billionaires”, which is at once beautifully lyrical and at the same time recognises the role of the mega-rich in plotting the future course of space exploration. Climate change is addressed as the astronauts watch a tornado as it cuts a devastating route across islands in the Pacific. Chie, the Japanese astronaut, finds out that her mother has died and reflects on the improbability of her birth (her mother survived the atom bombs on Japan at the end of the second world war) and her journey into space.

There are many small stories here – but I would have to accept that the absence of a larger, over-arching storyline was one I missed. Orbital has no real narrative structure, no story in the conventional sense. There is incident – when the mice being experimented on suddenly discover that the absence of gravity means they can effectively fly is a wonderful moment – but the book felt more like an extended short story rather than a novella. While the distinction between these two categories might seem slight |I do think it is significant. It meant that there were points in the book where, however wonderful the prose descriptions of the earth were, I felt that there are only so many of these that I needed.

I will definitely be looking out for more works by this author. Her description of the ‘cosmic calendar‘ concept, used to to visualise the chronology of the universe, scaling its currently understood age of nearly fourteen billion years into a single year in order to help us comprehend the vastness of its scale, was extraordinary, and worth the price of admission on its own. Although this is a familiar concept I don’t think I have ever read it described more lyrically or in fact beautifully as Harvey in this book. She is a great writer, even if here she is not such a great story-teller.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey 2023

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Book review

“When he’s fifteen, he and his mother move to a new town and he starts at a new school. It’s not an easy age to do that – the social order of the school is already well established and he has some difficulty making friends.”

In eight discontinuous chapters, David Szalay tells the story of Istvan, whose surname is never mentioned to preserve his ‘everyman’ status. The novel opens with 15-year-old István living with his single mother (his father is also never mentioned, but his absence from Istvan’s life casts a long shadow. This is a novel about fatherhood among other more prominent themes.) Isolated at school, he begins a sexual relationship with an older, married neighbour. Told from Istvan’s perspective this affair is not perceived as abusive, but he is clearly groomed and the reader can infer how damaging it is. He repeatedly describes the neighbour as ‘old’ and ‘ugly’ and focuses on the flaws in her less-than perfect body. Eventually a violent confrontation with her husband results in his accidental death; István is held responsible (rightly so) and is sent to juvenile detention. As with many critical episodes in his life, this period of detention is skipped over in the narrative, and the next chapter opens with István about to be discharged from five years’ service in the army. He has served in Kuwait and the Iraq War, but we only learn this after the event as we are told about his discharge and attempt to return to civilian society. Another end of chapter time jump sees him moving to London to work as a bouncer at a nightclub. From there he is hired as a chauffeur and bodyguard for a wealthy businessman and he soon begins an affair with the businessman’s wife, Helen.

Helen’s husband has a recurrence of cancer and despite the best treatment money can buy, he dies. Another time jumps sees Istvan and Helen married, Helen pregnant, and her teenage son Thomas bitterly resenting Istvan’s very existence. All of the businessman’s estate has been left to Thomas, held in trust until he turns 25. Helen and Istvan dip into this money (with the connivance of a dodgy lawyer) to fund property development schemes. I am going to stop this plot summary at this point because there some significant spoilers ahead, if I haven’t given too many already. Suffice to say there are some significant challenges ahead for Istvan.

It’s quite some time since I read a book where I was so conscious of the author, sitting behind a screen, tapping out scenes and challenging the reader to find them banal, improbable or unconvincing. His central character – virtually every scene is recounted through Istvan’s eyes, to the extent that the small number of scenes not told from his perspective stand out starkly – finds it very difficult to access or articulate his feelings. To demonstrate this Szalay gives us literally dozens of scenes where Istvan replies in monosyllables to anyone attempting to get him to communicate on anything other than the most basic level. In conversation he either replies any time he is addressed with “I don’t know”, “Yeah” or by repeating the question:

“It’s Istvan right?”

“Yeah”

“Where are you from?”

“Hungary”

“What’s that like?

Istvan isn’t sure what to say. He says what he tends to say when people ask that question.

“It’s okay”

“You go back much?”

“Sometimes”

“Visit family?”

“Yeah”

“You must miss it”

“Yeah, sometimes”

And so on, relentlessly, daring the reader to find this banal. Even scenes of conflict, danger or excitement are described in the same, monosyllabic unengaged tone, demonstrating no awareness of the questioner’s interest in what is being discussed. Szalay has made a brave, radical choice – to take an exciting life and focus on the moments in-between the incident and drama, so all we see are the moments of reflection; and then to create a character almost completely unable to reflect on what has happened to him with any degree of insight or coherence. Istvan’s inability to talk about the events of his life quickly becomes a burden to the reader. We get it, he is inarticulate, the point is really flogged to death. I could have done with fewer of these extended conversations where nothing is said – I doubt if I was the only reader who was tempted to let their eyes slide over a chunk of dull, phatic dialogue to the next paragraph.

Reflecting on this choice while announcing the novel’s Booker Prize 2025 award, the chair of judges, Roddy Doyle explained:

“At the end of the novel, we don’t know what the protagonist, István, looks like but this never feels like a lack; quite the opposite. Somehow, it’s the absence of words – or the absence of István’s words – that allow us to know István. Early in the book, we know that he cries because the person he’s with tells him not to; later in life, we know he’s balding because he envies another man’s hair; we know he grieves because, for several pages, there are no words at all. I don’t think I’ve read a novel that uses the white space on the page so well. It’s as if the author is inviting the reader to fill the space, to observe – almost to create – the character with him. The writing is spare and that is its great strength. Every word matters; the spaces between the words matter. 

If Szalay had chosen to write the scenes between the chapters, telling us directly about the moments that shape Istvan’s life, rather than letting most of it happen ‘off screen’, this would have been a very different novel, far more conventional, less challenging, but I suspect more enjoyable. But while interesting things happen to Istvan, I am not sure he is an interesting character. It will be clear by now that I am ambivalent about Flesh: you have got to admire the author’s audacity and technical skill, and I found the novel an extremely easy, two-day read, but the nagging doubt remains that at the heart of the novel there is a vacancy, a gap. Istvan drifts through life without forming any serious relationships – he is almost surprised when he realises at one point very late in the day that he actually likes his wife – and has nothing of interest to say. Perhaps Szalay was telling us that we are all, like Istvan, just flesh?

Flesh by David Szalay 2025

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