Language of waves and light

Six characters. A passing day. Stunning descriptions of the planet’s changes, from sunrise to sunset. Meditations on selfhood, togetherness, loneliness, time. Does this remind you of anything?

The critic Gaby Wood has already called Samantha Harvey “this generation’s Virginia Woolf”, in tribute to the author’s philosophically motivated lyrical writing. Orbital, Harvey’s fifth novel, is The Waves in space. Its six characters – the Russians Roman and Anton; the Japanese Chie; the Italian Pietro; the American Shaun; and the British Nell – are cosmonauts (the Russian designation) and astronauts (the American one), each “shot into the sky on a kerosene bomb, and then through the atmosphere in a burning capsule”. Now they orbit the Earth in the International Space Station at a height of 250 miles.

It is quite the perspective. Inside the spacecraft, due to political disputes down below, the WCs bear signs reading “RUSSIAN COSMONAUTS ONLY” and “AMERICAN, EUROPEAN AND JAPANESE ASTRONAUTS ONLY”. But through the windows only one, man-made, border is visible on Earth: a long trail of lights between Pakistan and India – and even that disappears in the daytime. Otherwise there is “no wall or barrier: no tribes, no war or corruption or particular cause for fear”; instead “a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation”.

It is so beautiful, that globe. Over the sixteen orbits tracked by the novel, dazzling descriptions of the planet rhythmically recur. There is Africa, “chiming with light” that is almost audible. Gran Canaria’s gorges pile the island up “like a sandcastle hastily built”. There is the “soft brushed nickel” of the Mediterranean; Uzbekistan, an “expanse of ochre and brown”; the “clean and brilliant Indian Ocean of blues untold”. And the light. The light strikes and stabs, sparkles and shimmers. When we are on Earth, Harvey writes, we look up and believe that heaven is elsewhere, but the space voyagers see differently. If we must go to an “improbably hard-to-believe in place” when we die, then that might be Earth itself, that “glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows”.

Those light shows are better at night, the cosmonauts and astronauts agree during the early stages of their space tenancy, but their view changes. During the day Earth is easier to see. When they look at it, the “small and babbling pantomime of politics” that arrives over their newsfeed is invisible. And then, they realize, it isn’t: “Every swirling neon or red algal bloom in the polluted, warming, overfished Atlantic is crafted in large part by the hand of politics and human choices”. Cruising in their “phallic ship”, whose lift-off boosters burn “the fuel of a million cars”, they both witness and collude in the disaster.

Harvey has been perfecting her lush philosophical prose in novels remarkable for their range: The Wilderness (2009) featured the Lincolnshire Wolds and factories, bleaching a man’s memory; All Is Song (TLS, March 9, 2012) reimagined the death of Socrates in contemporary London; Dear Thief (2014) was a novelization of Leonard Cohen’s song “Famous Blue Raincoat”; and The Western Wind (TLS, March 16, 2018) was a medieval murder mystery. Harvey’s insomnia memoir, The Shapeless Unease (TLS, April 10, 2020), is in the same strain of lavish rumination as this latest novel. In outer space the author hits on the pure swirlingness that her previous works seem to aspire to. The characters’ thoughts mix and flow with the colours and light. Beauty doesn’t come from goodness but from aliveness, reflects Pietro; and so progress is beautiful. We seek life on other planets as “our consolation for being trivial”; we know we are not special enough to be all there is.

As their craft orbits the six cosmonauts and astronauts are distracted by another space voyage: a rocket is carrying four people beyond them, to the Moon. There is further talk of colonizing Mars. In a moving passage Samantha Harvey plays with the idea that, if the Big Bang happened on January 1 of a cosmic year, humanity would arrive at one second from midnight on December 31. Here, in the final instant, appears a motley assortment of human achievements, including antibiotics, Billie Holiday, birth control and the sprung mattress. It’s a mixture of the sublime and the mundane, but none of it matters because, in another split second, millennia will pass and Earth’s beings will have become “exoskeletal-cybernetic-machine-deathless-postbeings who’ve harnessed the energy of some hapless star and are guzzling it dry”. It is a warning no less devastating for being so sumptuously written.

Kate McLoughlin is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Harris Manchester College. She is currently completing a literary history of silence

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