The customary Booker Prize winner is, like the MFA novels battling for the laurel, a product of many compromises. On the one hand, the legacy institutions cling desperately to the remnants of their prestige during an era in which the very notion of prestige is as precarious as the production of literature itself: finding any book worthy enough to not further demean the reputation of the Prize by its bestowal is difficult enough; add to that the mutually hostile demand that it might be adored by the general public. Any consumer of contemporary literature is familiar with the end result of this compromise: small “l” literary with enough genre convention to find its way into book clubs, morally ambiguous but not so much as to obscure its political message (lest The Guardian have to think of adjectives beyond “urgent” and “important” in their praise), with prose elevated beyond the typical Taylor Jenkins Reid fare but never so much as to alienate the typical Taylor Jenkins reader. They are magical realist murder mysteries, multigenerational historical epics, Westerns and dystopians that are just anticlimactic enough to escape the “genre” label. Year after year these types of novels win, yet no matter how simply they are written and how watered down from their literary precursors, they are always viewed as somehow elitist. The average reader on Goodreads will protest: too long, too slow, too many big words, too unlikeable a protagonist. The legacy media review outlets are typically more forgiving so long as the book has the right politics. Yet, in 2024, it seemed as if the Booker Prize disregarded both of these types of readers, attempting instead to re-assert itself as a proper authority of literary merit, rejecting the aesthetic bolshevism of the 21st century which seeks to democratize every art form until no thought is necessary for either its production or consumption.
Samantha Harvey’s Orbital is certainly a deviation from the norm. It stands in stark contrast to the more crowd pleasing and already bestselling James, the expected winner. Not only does Orbital lack a plot, it lacks a plot in such a way that makes To The Lighthouse read like The Name of the Rose. Six astronauts are orbiting the Earth on a space station: they follow a hurricane ravaging southeast Asia, they land on the moon. These events have no causal relationship and lead to no character arcs. The absence of dramatic structure renders a daringly anti-commercial form that mirrors both the ocular stasis of the space station and the lives aboard it. Moreover, its prerequisite political message is fairly muted, limited to two pages in which the omniscient narrator comments on political decisions affecting the Earth’s surface as the crew follows a typhoon ravaging through the Philippines. If there was any stipulation, real or implied, that a Booker winner be politically relevant, those couple of pages were enough to meet compliance. The Booker press release cited its win “in a year of geopolitical crisis, likely to be the warmest year in recorded history.” And yet, one gets the sense that despite whatever institutional demand exists for such topicality, the judges themselves were as tired of politically-driven fiction as everyone else. Edmund de Waal, the chair of the judges, remarked, “I don’t think fiction has a practical impact. I’m not interested in books about issues. I’m interested in books that inhabit ideas through fiction. Whether it changes the next round of Cop, it’s not for me as the chair of judges to say. I don’t understand the relationship between fiction and political action.” This rejection of both the political and the commercial at the prestige level seemed like a happy portent.
So what does Orbital, in its forfeit of both politics and commercial novelistic conventions, serve in its stead? Prose: lush, poetic, lyrical beyond many a recent poetry collection. Note the adept use of rhythm, anaphora, and consonance in the following sentence:
“They will each be here for nine months or so, nine months of this weightless drifting, nine months of this swollen head, nine months of this sardine living, nine months of this earthward gaping, then back to the patient planet below.”
The beauty of the sentences remains a constant for the entirety of the 207 pages. Like the astronauts themselves in their zero gravity domicile, the sentences are airy and serene with none of the density concomitant with high style. The “wild and wakeful” Earth seems to nearly come alive in these passages and, for about 90 pages, this is almost sufficient to make a good novel.
For all the poetically-crafted sentences, there’s never any serious sense of interiority or pathos. There is nothing you can learn about any character in the novel that couldn’t just as easily be a footnote. Nell, an atheist who briefly discusses the possibility of God with theist Shaun in what I suppose is meant to be a philosophical passage, is in an unsatisfying marriage that crumbles the longer that she’s away. Chie, another astronaut, loses her mother. She longs to return back to her native Japan because her mother is “there.” Nell and Chie are the two most memorable characters and those are the most memorable aspects about them. There is a sequence describing the “Russian toilet” and a toilet for everyone else (government orders) that the whole crew violates by using each other’s toilets in defiance of the regulations as a symbol of world solidarity. There is never any conflict between the space travelers and for the reason that in such confined quarters there cannot afford to be. One might say they are all just too well adjusted to carry a novel in which there is no tangible external danger to themselves, and—more charitably to the book—one also might ask what it says about us that there needs to be conflict in order for a book to be compelling, even readable. Isn’t the sublimity of our planet enough? Orbital dares to ask. “They inside make somersaults backwards and forwards, because sometimes that’s the only thing to do when you’re falling and falling around the earth.” The reader too feels those somersaults. A feeling of vague wonder gives way to a queasiness as these sorts of passages continue for the book’s length. With each pass of the globe Harvey reaches for cosmic revelation that remains as far from grasp as the earth from the space station. It all becomes a sort of hangover of astonishment.
If Harvey seems to reach beyond human capacity towards this ever diminishing astonishment, James Wood writing for the New Yorker manages to reach even further likening her to a “Melville of the skies,” a comparison he saccharinely labors more than once in his review: “As Melville describes and redescribes his whale, so Harvey ceaselessly drapes our globe in words, and, as with Melville, each redescription is also a reckoning, a theological sizing up.”
Moby Dick might be a useful comparison here but perhaps not in the way Woods thinks, and certainly not in a way that does either author any favors. Melville’s whale is only present for a brief portion of the novel at its end, whereas the observation of Harvey’s Earth makes up Orbital’s entirety. The white whale’s presence is constant and even more so in its absence while Harvey’s Earth feels remote despite never leaving our narrator’s eye; if there’s any sort of “theological sizing up” only one of these points towards the divine. The devil, God, nature, fate, reason, demiurge — all of these things and hundreds more Melville’s whale can be said to signify, whereas Harvey’s Earth never signifies anything beyond itself.
Both novels are immersed in the tedium and beauty of sea and space life. It may even be accurate to say that the two novels would share a similar structure if Moby Dick were only its middle chapters. Of course, all of the cetology, whaling industry facts, “fast fish,” and “loose fish” become an encyclopedia-like attempt to understand man, nature, and God, and ultimately highlight the absurdity of the type of totalizing knowledge that drives Ahab’s hunt for the whale. This cosmic thirst for understanding, this punch behind the pasteboard mask, is absent in Orbital because it wants to appreciate the surface beauty of the universe with no regard to its ever elusive ontology. There is no “theological sizing up” here. The only thing Wood’s comparison of the two novels can possibly achieve then is an illustration of how the book fails not only by traditional novelistic conventions but as the prose poem it demands to be read as.
Should not this book be read on its own terms though? Harvey herself laid out the terms rather concisely. Her essay, “Space Pastoral: Finding a New Literary Genre in the Slow Death of the International Space Station,” published the same day as Orbital, functions almost like an instruction manual on how to read her book. It’s a fascinating piece about the International Space Station, which, hurtling in low orbit around the globe for over 23 years, through extreme heat, cold, and solar radiation, and with continuous human habitation, is starting to show some wear and tear. As this outmoded station spins towards its demise, destined to become junk at the bottom of the Atlantic, an era ends. For Harvey, it’s a lapse of innocence. She posits that the early decades of space travel will take on a mythic space in our collective imaginations similar to the wilderness of Medieval England. Read, in that way then, as a celestial song of innocence, Orbital starts to make sense. For these astronauts and cosmonauts, their longings, struggles, and conflicts remain on Earth where the novel doesn’t tread. In space, their lives are profoundly simple, routine, and monastic in ways a Romantic poet would associate with a more spiritually vital era. The lack of any real flaws in any character on board further situates them in a time of innocence. They are often ambushed by a desire to never leave space, finding happiness in the banality of their surroundings, achieving a romanticization of their own lives as they exist in that moment.
It’s an ancient type of contentment they pay for through their bodies—the muscular and bone density decreasing the longer they’re in space, their lifespans shortening through myriad medical problems that will show up later in life—and with the continuous straining of their relationships down on Earth. These sorts of consequences are discussed briefly in essayistic discussions but never show up in the actual narrative. Despite the novel’s thesis, stated directly in both the novel itself and by Harvey herself in its promotion, that the Earth’s surface is sculpted by political decisions, these Eclogues of the skies deal with very few consequences: there is no unrequited love, no institutional threat to their way of life, no harm caused by the constant threat of an inhospitable environment, and should any rituals take place it is not born of a need to appease the gods. Life in low orbit might be mollifying for these passengers, but it never feels idyllic.
For a novel that fails in nearly every estimable facet beyond the rhythm of its sentences and its adherence to its form, it is curious how this won the Booker Prize. The more conspiratorially-minded might note how Harvey blurbed last year’s winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch and including him in Orbital’s Acknowledgements, remarking how lovely it is that two close friends found such success in a year’s span. My estimation of its success is more optimistic. Given Orbital’s complete abandonment of novelistic conventions or any formula that would put it on a bestseller’s list, along with its relative lack of political posturing, it might just be that the Booker Prize was trying to shed its reputation as “The People’s Prize,” foregoing its customary role as ad booster of middlebrow book club fare and instead trying to recognize the year’s highest literary achievement. It might be that Orbital’s recognition is less a result of industry machination than an inability to even discern what literary achievement looks like in the 2020s.
For the past decade, our cultural conception of any art form has allowed it but two functions: the “commercial” art of escapism and the “serious” art of political fablemaking. We now reach beyond this binary, if not entirely beyond its obsession with the “global-cultural context” at large. Something like Orbital indicates beauty through its lyricism, but lacks the strangeness, poignancy, and philosophic vitality of something truly beautiful. Nor does the narrator’s sustained astonishment of how fast the station moves through space create any sensation of the sublimity they so desperately chase. This sort of gestural profundity has been tired for years, but is in nearly every literary novel propped by the hype machine. Paul Lynch won the Booker in 2023, for a book that is a pale imitation of The Road, the entire climax serving no purpose beyond belaboring a wildly cliche metaphor for the sake of the perfectly manicured final line. It was not without its merits, certainly better than Orbital, but one has to wonder if such writing would stand out in an era where so much literary fiction wasn’t written like YA. When every writing program and workshop shudders at a paragraph longer than five lines, a novel with long enough blocks of text can very well make Garth Greenwell’s plotless New Sincerity discourse novel seem like “a daring, mysterious work that audaciously and successfully marries the physical and the metaphysical.” Orbital’s win may be a step in the right direction, but if these legacy institutions wish to reclaim the prestige of the twentieth century, they might do well to re-embrace the twentieth century’s treatment of aesthetics as a serious discipline.
Adam Pearson writes the Substack newsletter The Pensive Pejorative. He lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.