Earth, serene, maternal, achingly, vulnerably beautiful, is the chief character in Orbital. She is up, not down, from within the orbiting International Space Station, the setting of this novel, as the crew experience no gravity, and it feels like she is heaven, shining above them and, with all the human frontiers and conflicts concealed by distance, an island of peace in the vastness of space.
She is undoubtedly a She. The Mother Earth metaphor is evoked, but not overworked, present in her relationship with the astronauts, who remember her as the matrix of their lives and their families’ lives prior to arrival on the ISS, continuing in their absence through her nurture, and to be returned to when their tour on board concludes. They watch her, captivated: they dream constantly of her.
Sometimes, in the swoon of night, the crew share the same dreams of the Earth, even swapping a stream of consciousness between them when awake from time to time. The Earth is both hallucinatory and yet the only reality they know. Or is it that, through the image of their planetary Mother hanging over them, they have a bond that transcends earthly nationalisms and hostilities?
They are after all an international group: two Americans, two Russians, two Europeans - a Brit and an Italian - two of them women and four men. They share an ongoing joke about the separate Russian toilets, which the others are never supposed to use, and take delight in flouting this relic of earthbound restriction and suspicion. Are the crew a metaphor for how humanity needs to change in order to live together in peace? Is the ISS a symbol for the suffering, broken world it circles round every ninety minutes? Is there hope that we can pull back from the brink of mutual destruction?
There is another hope on offer, which is the launch of a manned mission to the Moon during the period described in Orbital. This is presented as the first step towards a human future as an interplanetary species, leaving the nursery of Earth behind to achieve the conquest of space. The ISS’s view is backwards, constantly contemplating and monitoring Earth, their eyes filled with the vision of her goodness and abundance. The Moon mission’s gaze is forwards, “to boldly go…” Yet this galactic ambition had no resonance for anybody in our group (yes, I owe this review once again to the Dorking U3A Book Readers). We all felt it was insane to go and live in a high tech Portakabin in the freezing, sterile wastes of Mars. Bleurgh! For us at least, that hope is no hope at all.
Yet the Earth is also perilous. A huge super-typhoon is brewing in the Pacific and is threatening the Philippines, where a couple of the astronauts have friends. They watch helplessly as they see it grow larger and more menacing, passing over it aver hour and a half. Clearly our author is presenting man made climate change here. She doesn’t present this, or anything else, in a ranting political way, just describes it and leaves us to draw our own conclusions – and it’s all the more powerful for that.
In the last few pages of Orbital two odd things happen. One is that the typhoon finally strikes and causes vast damage, but the friends of the crew down there are saved. They have sought refuge in a church whose walls somehow survive the onslaught. Having built up typhonic tension over many pages, what was the purpose of this unlooked for rescue? Some of our group felt that Harvey was pulling her punches here, mitigating the authenticity of her stance on climate change for the sake of a happy ending. Others objected that she was projecting a false hope that God would come to the rescue, which might even undermine the necessity for global warming action. Is she just trying to hint that human beings have a habit of surviving, that maybe some of us will get through? Characteristically she doesn’t tell us.
The other oddity is the conclusion of the novel with the music of the spheres. This goes back to pre-scientific classical and medieval ideas about the harmony of the universe. In Harvey’s version the music is rough and ready and has assimilated lots of jarring notes, but nonetheless it is present. What is it doing here? Perhaps she wants to give us at least this faint hope, that in the very long run the universe has a purpose and that the arc of space time bends at last towards music. But if so, Harvey doesn’t brandish it dialectically in our faces. We must respond in our own way.
More questions then than answers in this review. This beautiful book isn’t exactly a novel. It is much more like a poem, there to reverberate in our imaginations rather than to tell us the answers. The steady orbits of the Space Station are like the stanzas of the poem, the crew’s dream-like alternative state of consciousness supplies its visionary quality. Above all it is a love poem that seeks to open our eyes and move us with the beauty and fragility of our home planet, Mother Earth. In view of the calamitous threats currently facing her through human greed, stupidity and malice, it is imperative that you read this poem and let it resonate.
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