This isn’t my usual kind of book, with it being about space travel, but it was our bookclub choice and the blurb on the back sounds interesting so I am quite willing to give it a go. Grab your copy and let’s read it together!
This isn’t my usual kind of book, with it being about space travel, but it was our bookclub choice and the blurb on the back sounds interesting so I am quite willing to give it a go. Grab your copy and let’s read it together!
I’m finding this quite an unusual book and hard to summarise as I read it, as basically not much happens! It seems to be a snapshot of the lives of a group of astronauts travelling in space around the circumference of earth again and again, and monitoring the earth and their various experiments onboard the spaceship for research, whilst also being monitored themselves in order to learn more about the effect of space travel on humans…and that’s about it really! I keep expecting some drama to happen while they are in space, but there seems to be no sign of a drama! However, this lack of drama isn’t a criticism, as I’m finding that I quite admire the unusualness of not having a drama happen, I feel like the author is challenging the usual stereotypes of this type of book and has resisted the temptation to do as most other authors would do. I just hope she doesn’t then prove my admiration ill-founded and bring in some sudden surprising drama towards the end! I’m also finding it quite a peaceful book to read as it just details the astronauts’ daily routines of monitoring things, and their dreams and thoughts, their experiences and feelings such as their appreciation of the wonderful exciting things they see out of the windows, as well as their feelings of missing home and their families. It could be said that this is possibly quite repetitive at times, but again I find this is calming in its predictability, and while it is a relaxing book to read it is also very thought-provoking.
It’s strange considering the astronauts as the main characters of the book as I don’t really feel like I am getting to know them individually, they are named and some of their family life is detailed but I feel like I am being shown more of their reactions of awe and wonder at the things they see and I am learning about them in this way rather than learning about them as individual people. And when I presumed they were the main characters, I am now thinking if they are actually intended to be minor characters, and the main character is the earth they are looking at. And indeed, I feel like I am getting just as many insights into the characters of people living on earth, particularly those in the path of the typhoon, as I am of the astronauts. I also really like that the author has the astronauts full of awe and wonder at what they see, not jaded by all their training and they are just there doing a job or distracted by other exciting things they may do as astronauts in the future, they are genuinely blown away by what they see and are sometimes even unable to leave the windows, and I feel that this portrays their humanity to me and helps me feel a little more connected with these people so far removed (in every sense) from myself. This writing style really fascinates me, I feel again and again what an unusual book this is and how differently the author is looking at things, so much about it surprises me and makes me think there was such a lot of planning about the structure and what was included and what wasn’t, for what seems like such a simple small book on the surface, and I am quickly realising that this book is far far more complex than I originally thought. And I’m impressed all the time by the author’s choice of such an unusual subject (space travel), particularly with her having no direct experience of it, and impressed at the way she portrays it so accurately (or at least, I presume it is accurately portrayed, obviously I have never been to space myself in order to know!). Though I guess her portrayal of space travel is more focused on the astronauts’ awe and wonder at what they are seeing, so perhaps if she is well-travelled herself and has been to many of the amazing sights in the world then perhaps she is channelling her own feelings of awe and wonder and applying these to the astronauts.
I am noticing one possible theme of the book though, this being the depiction of contrasts, and now I’ve noticed a few instances of this I am looking for more and more (possibly becoming a little obsessed with it, tee hee, but we always like our own theories, don’t we?!) and have begun listing examples of contrasts. So I noticed contrasts particularly with the astronauts’ lives in space, some examples being the vast contrast between the mundane everyday tasks they must do compared to the mind-blowing things they see out of the window many times a day, the contrast of them yearning for home and yet also never want to leave the spaceship, the contrast of them depending so thoroughly on each other for their survival and yet also being frustrated with each other for not being like the family members they miss, the contrast of how safe they are in their controlled environment in the spaceship without the perils of disease and storms of earth and yet how dangerously vulnerable they are hurtling around space, the contrast of them being at the peak of physical and mental fitness when they left earth and yet how space travel damages almost every part of their bodies, the contrast of them observing and studying the earth yet also being observed and studied themselves every minute, the contrast of them studying the typhoon in great detail from above and yet being powerless to stop the damage it will do, the contrast of the amount of sunsets and sunrises they see while they circle earth and yet having to falsely create night and day inside their spaceship, and the contrast of how enormous earth seems when a person is living on it compared with how tiny it seems to the astronauts when they view infinite space around it (I think this is one of my favourite contrasts actually, having the astronauts being detached from earth and so able to view it from above and appreciate its wonder and beauty even more than they did when living on earth). I am loving all these clever contrasts!
As I read, I am wondering what the message of the book is, what the author is aiming to portray. I am presuming it is highlighting the damage that humans are doing to earth, and if so then her approach to this is again unusual and very clever as she isn’t seeming to preach or lecture the reader on the damage that has been done but instead choosing to get her message across by reminding the reader of how amazing and beautiful earth is, I guess to encourage us to feel the same awe and wonder that the astronauts feel about earth and therefore encourage us to determine to try and appreciate earth more and yearn to protect it. One of the contrasts I listed above seems to particularly demonstrate this, by offering the reader the idea of how enormous earth may feel to us living on it and yet how tiny and vulnerable it actually is when viewed from above, just suspended in space, and therefore how we need to value and care for it.
So often while reading this book, I am pausing to consider and admire the writing style of the author (to be frank, I’m in almost as much awe and wonder at this, as I am when thinking about the beauty and fragility of earth!). Not only is her writing so very clever, it is also so incredibly beautiful and imaginative. The descriptions of earth and the different countries the astronauts see are stunningly written and makes me yearn to learn more about some of the rivers and cities and mountains mentioned (and also makes me realise how poor my knowledge of earth’s different areas really is!). One of my favourite sections is the description of the Northern Lights, ‘It ripples, spills, it’s smoke that pours across the face of the planet…the light gains edges and limbs; folds and opens. Strains against the inside of the atmosphere, writhes and flexes. Sends up plumes. Fluoresces and brightens. Detonates then in towers of light. Erupts clean through the atmosphere and puts up towers two hundred miles high…across the globe a shimmering hum of rolling light, of flickering, quavering, flooding light, and the depth of space is mapped in light. Here the flowing, flooding green, there the snaking blades of neon, there the vertical columns of red’, wow, wow, wow, I read that over and over and over again, I don’t think I’ve possibly ever read anything so beautiful, it almost made me feel emotional, and I loved how she made the Northern Lights almost seem (well, to me anyway), like a living animal, like a dragon! I also really like how her detailed descriptions often convey a range of senses, such as sight and sound and touch, which then enables a full picture of the scene to be built up and also feels very mindful and meditative. One example is the paragraph, ‘Think of a wooden house that’s worn, all its wood smooth to the touch…pumpkins growing, lots of them, as big as the moon looks in its summer fullness…nothing but the sound of cicadas, crickets, bullfrogs, the tear-tear of the woman’s hands at weeds, the tap-tap of the man’s brisk voice between bouts of digging, and the sea’. And then there’s the really gorgeously imaginative use of words to bring together nature and man-made, such as the sentence, ‘Imagine a butterfly on the tap at the kitchen sink, a dragonfly on the folded futon, a spider inside a slipper in the front porch’. She is an incredible writer! And I’ve also noticed that some sections of writing are at different speeds from other sections of writing, as some read quite slowly and ponderously and are very detailed and promote deep consideration in me (the Northern Lights section, and worn wooden house section, both detailed above), and then some just contain a list of short punchy words which read very quickly and feel very impactful to me (such as the section listing the things which have been blown away by the typhoon), and I’m quite fascinated by these different styles of writing and the feelings that the author is wishing to create in the reader by this, it’s very clever and as I said before must have required such planning to create. And again, these different writing styles link me back to the theme of contrasts too, as they are contrasting writing styles. I can imagine this book being studied in classes about language and creative writing, as it really feels quite ground-breaking and like I am being shown completely different ways of doing things.
Even though I am now approaching the end of the book, I am still struck with not just the beauty and imagination of the writer but also her ability to make me see things differently. One example is earth being described as a spaceship, wow, that really struck me as I’ve never thought of earth like that but I guess it is, I tend to just think of ‘spaceships’ as those vehicles carrying astronauts, as in this book, but of course our earth is travelling in space too carrying all of us humans and therefore another reminder of how vital this ‘vehicle’ is to our survival, very clever! Another example was the line ‘You must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory, because humanity doesn’t know when to stop’, and I wonder if this relates back to (what I presume) is the message of the book to make us think about the damage that we’re doing to earth, reminding us that although we can be proud of the advances we have created, there is often a detrimental cost to these and the cost is often damage to the earth (or indeed to space, as the discarded equipment flying around in space is often mentioned in this book). And another line which I will remember is ‘The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want’, and I found that very powerfully sobering as again whilst admiring the advances humans have made I also see (in relation to the damage we have done to earth) that word ‘want’ could actually be read as ‘selfish’ or ‘blinkered’ or ‘inconsiderate’. And on a slightly different note, I loved the line ‘His tears form four droplets which float away from his eyes, and which he and Chie catch in the palms of their hands’, wow, that blows my mind a bit, that in space tears float away from your eyes rather than running down your face, and I like that (as with this line) little things such as this are mentioned as well as the huge big things. There have also been a few mentions by the astronauts of a painting called Las Meninas by Velázquez, which I will have to look up as I’ve never heard of it before and it sounds amazingly clever and unique with it being like a potential puzzle as it is a painting within a painting within a painting (!) and there is the question of who the subject matter in the painting is, (and later one of the astronauts suggests that the subject matter is the dog), and also the cleverness and uniqueness of this painting reminds me of the cleverness and uniqueness of this book and its author, and I presume the author is also fascinated by this painting and I wonder if she meant to replicate this in some way with the question of who is the subject matter of the book, is it the astronauts or is it the earth.
And now that I’ve finished the book, there has indeed been no drama (though I was on high-alert when one of the astronauts mentioned a crack that had appeared in the spaceship, but that came to nothing), and I am still admiring the author for resisting introducing a drama. I wonder if she felt that not putting in a drama then further emphasised the drama of what the astronauts were actually doing, that their situation of hurtling around space was such a life-changing drama in itself that there was no more drama she felt could match this, and I certainly felt that the enormity of what they were doing hit me more because there was no other drama introduced to distract me. And I guess this lack of drama made me also feel that I was just observing the astronauts, who are in turn observing the earth. But I’ve realised that the author had actually written a drama but had put this drama on earth rather than in space, as there was the typhoon raging in the Philippines that the astronauts observed from above and there were details of the experiences of the people on earth as their homes were destroyed and their lives in danger. So that was an interesting decision of the author’s to place the drama on earth rather than in space and I wondered if she did this to remind us that earth is just as amazing and powerful (or perhaps even more so) than space? I liked too the cleverness of the similarity of the group trapped in the church barricaded against the danger of the typhoon outside, just like the astronauts were trapped in their spaceship barricaded against the danger of space outside. However, I note that we didn’t see the conclusion of the astronauts’ mission and them arriving back on earth, which surprised me, so we don’t know if they survived, was there actually a drama that happened to the astronauts later that we’ve not seen?! And again we didn’t see the conclusion of the people trapped in the church during the typhoon and whether they survived. But I guess these lack of endings fits with the author perhaps wanting it to be just a snapshot in time that the reader learns about, both of the astronauts’ lives and the lives of those on earth, rather than the whole of their stories. Wow, right up to the end, the book has been full of surprises and thought-provoking scenes, a very clever book altogether!
There were also several facts within the book that I adored learning about, such as Arctic Terns flying 10,000 miles pole to pole which seems such an incredible feat (and also then ironically reduces slightly for me the incredible feat of space travel, as these tiny birds are doing something just as incredible but powered solely by themselves, which I wonder if this is what the author intended, to remind us that while space travel is very impressive, Mother Nature is often even more impressive)! And staying with nature, wow, how amazing are the frogfish, I’d never heard of them before and had to look them up, they are so brightly coloured and they do indeed have limbs like frogs and they walk along, I am fascinated by them now! I also loved that Winnie the Pooh was known to all the five nationalities of the astronauts, and I presume this book is really available in all those countries, which feels amazing that a tale I love so well has also been loved by people speaking entirely different languages to me (I realise this must happen with so many of the books that I love, but I’d just never considered it before and somehow it seems every more remarkable with a simple little children’s tale!).
The only thing that bothered me about the book was the mice onboard, sigh. I am heartened that the astronauts seemed to be very caring towards the mice, but those mice didn’t choose to be there like the astronauts chose to be there and I hate to think of them suffering just in order to enable humans to learn about the damage of space travel on living creatures.
But wow, what a book! Definitely very unusual, and one that I’ve found is quite difficult to summarise accurately to someone, and definitely very different to what I imagined it would be! I see it has won several awards, and I’d say these are very well-deserved! There are many things in this book which will stay with me for quite some time, and I am very impressed at the power of this author’s writing. I will look out for more of her books, The Western Wind sounds very intriguing and very different from Orbital as it seems like it’s a bit of a mystery how someone met their death (but I imagine the book isn’t as straightforward as it appears on the surface, given how she wrote Orbital!). The Wilderness also sounds a bit like a mystery being revealed, though very unusually told through the theme of Alzheimer’s, wow, I imagine that could be a tear-jerker! And her book Dear Thief sounds like a fascinatingly slow reveal kind of story too, though this is done in the form of a series of letters which really excites me as I love epistolary novels, which I presume this must be. And usually when I read a book, I am reminded (obviously intending this as flattery to the author of the book I am reading) of other books I have read and then am tempted to re-read those, but errrmm, I can’t think of any other book that Orbital is similar to, it just seems so completely unique! So I will have to contend myself by just reading all of Samantha Harvey’s other books!
