Review by Rosalind Coleman
When I lived in Norfolk, I ran a small music promotion company called Grook Presents.
Grook was a word I had found while studying Piet Hein, a Danish polymath. pacifist and inventor of the superellipse, who had given this name to a short poem format he developed and then used his whole life. One of my favourite grooks by Piet Hein is :
Co-existence
Or
No-existence
As you can see. The poetic form is short and to the point, but fits a lot in. I admire this because I am an excessively wordy person. How could one person distil so much reason and feeling into a three word rhyme?
I feel similarly about Orbital by Samantha Harvey. The poem above might have been my first conscious foray into thinking artistically about interbeing, but it was not my first introduction to it. Having devoured The Ages of Gaia by James Lovelock when I was a teenager, I was long onboard with the idea of our Earth as one self-regulating giant organism / deity.
This book, however – Orbital – is so slim, so precise, so elegant and drifting it’s astounding to me that Harvey has managed to do so much with so little. Here up close and in high definition, is the power of the story to cover a lot of ground, in very cramped conditions.
A sparing, awe-filled, at times vertiginous drift above the earth, the language is mesmerising and magical and – frequently – deserves to be read aloud. In a tiny tin-can spaceship, six astronauts (technically five astronauts and one cosmonaut) watch and dream, exercise, eat food, test space mice, grow pea shoots, and slowly waste away. Reminding us at every second that living in outer space permanently would be rubbish, these lucky best of the best, on their months-long tour, make orbits of the earth below – unable to break free of the earth’s gravity – or to return home – until their mission completes.
Continents pass them by, and each day contains multiple dawns and sunsets as they race around the globe. Ninety nine point nine per cent of us will never go to space, or experience the overview effect in person – but this elegant little novel allows us to live into the lives and innermost thoughts of these six passengers, as if we were there ourselves.
The embodied sensations of zero gravity falling. The love song passages of prose that detail landmass, geographic border, world wonders, and weather events. The stories of their loved ones, living below them. Our intimate comprehension of their experience expands and pulses with each circuit that they make, and with every ellipse, with every orbit, we live into them a bit more.
If you would like to feel a full, broad-horizoned emotional experience of the value of this tiny, massive, ferocious, vulnerable, sacred, profane and wonderful green-blue planet (and our place in it – and the wonder that it brings) – then this book has a spine-tingling tour of tears and chills and joy and drifting, waiting for you.
