Samantha harvey almost gave up on her novel Orbitalwho won last night this year’s Booker Prize. Set on the International Space Station (ISS) 250 miles from Earth, Orbital follows the daily lives of four astronauts and two astronauts as they hurtle through space at 17,500 mph. She was a few thousand words in and suddenly lost her nerve. She felt she was trespassing in space. “I’m so spectacularly not an astronaut,” she laughs when we meet for coffee the morning after the Booker ceremony. “I am so unadventurous, so unwise, so impractical, cowardly, anxious. I would be terrible.”
After a few months of struggling with other ideas, she accidentally opened the abandoned word document on her computer. When she read it, she found it had an integrity and pulse that drew her more than any of the other projects she had worked on. “I thought: ‘I shouldn’t be afraid of this. If I can do it in a way that’s different from the way astronauts write about their time in space, then maybe there’s something here.” So she climbs back in and achieves liftoff.
Described as both “this generation’s Virginia Woolf” and “a kind of Melville of the skies”, Harvey was the only British author on this year’s Booker shortlist. Orbital, her fifth novel, is a beautiful, powerful and wholly original work of fiction. It takes place over one day, but time is different in space, where “the whiplash of morning comes every ninety minutes” and the sun is “up-down-up-down like a mechanical toy”. Each of the 16 chapters records a single orbit of the Earth. Everyday tasks – vacuuming the capsule, monitoring mice and microbes – are set against the mercy of the universe. One of the toilets is always blocked. A super typhoon is approaching the Philippines. Each of the six characters is given only bits of background: Chie’s mother is dead; Anton fell in love with his wife; Shaun longs for his.
Although it may be set in space, the subject is Earth. It’s a 136-page love letter to our troubled planet – she calls it “space pastoral”, a kind of nature script of the universe. “I wanted to write a celebration of the earth’s beauty, but with a sense of sadness or an ache of loss about what we are doing to it,” she says. Soft-spoken, with a cloud of light hair and delicate features, Harvey has an ethereal, otherworldly quality. She doesn’t have a cell phone, dumb or otherwise, let alone a social media account.
She lives in a 16th-century house in a village on the Wiltshire-Somerset borders. “I can always back off more,” she jokes. For years she has been taking life sculpting classes and there is a life-size statue of her partner (who is 6ft 2in), which she has tried to hide behind bushes in the back garden. She writes in a “cold, decrepit, musty, old room” that lacks decoration. She is as serious, sincere and slightly strange – in a good way – as her fiction, with such a soft and modest manner that it never seems preachy.
Although Harvey is not religious herself, she returns to faith in her fiction (only briefly in Orbital). “Now that we live in such a secular society,” she says, “where do we get our great philosophical ideas from? Where do we find meaning?” From a retired architect’s descent into Alzheimer’s in her award-winning 2009 first novel The Wildernessto “the medieval murder mystery” of The West Wind in 2018, Harvey explored philosophical questions about being, time, faith and memory in her fiction, which also includes Everything Is Song (2012) and Dear thief (2014). With each novel she formally entered new territory. But this is her 2020 memoir of her years-long struggle with insomnia, The formless unrestwhat she feels Orbital has most in common with – her own cyclical bouts of darkness and distorted time, not so different from those experienced by the astronauts.
“I almost hit 40 and got anxious,” she says. “I don’t know why. I think maybe I just decided it was time to have some kind of crisis.” Suddenly she couldn’t sleep anymore. “I found the world kind of abrasive. Everything was too noisy and too busy and too big.”
She found her escape both in front of her nose and 250 miles away. Taking the idea of an armchair traveler to a new frontier, she spends “thousands and thousands” of hours orbiting the globe in cyberspace. Her insomnia also gave her a greater sense of happiness and joy, and it was from this euphoric place – “almost like being in love” – that she began writing Orbital. Insomnia even changed how she wrote: both her memoir and Orbital were completed in short, concentrated bursts. So “everything feels much more urgent”.
Although she started Orbital before the pandemic, most of it was written during lockdown. She always has footage of the International Space Station playing on her desk. “It was an enormous comfort for me to be able to go to space every day, practically in my imagination,” she says. “When I’m down here on earth, I find it hard to be comforted by the things we do to the earth and to each other. But when I zoom out, I can feel something that looks more like peace. I can look at it almost without judgement, just look at its beauty.”
She was not a space nerd as a child. She grew up in Kent and then “all over the place”, in what she describes as “a working class”, not particularly bookish, household. Her father was a builder and her mother stayed at home until her parents divorced when she was 10. Her mother became a ghostwriter, which had a profound influence on her. “I would see her there, day after day, hour after hour, at her computer, just doing this mysterious thing, just writing,” she recalls.
Like many children of the 80s, Harvey remembers the 1986 Challenger rocket disaster – poignantly mentioned in the novel. The family has the Nasa Space Center in Houston on vacation in Texas, and there are pictures of her as a girl in front of giant rockets. Where other teenagers collected Duran Duran posters, she began collecting quotes by astronauts. “I’ve always been into these grand philosophical, or sentimental, gestures about things.”
Many years later, when she was writing her first (as yet unpublished) novel and while completing The Wilderness, she took an admin position at the Herschel Museum of Astronomy in Bath, a Georgian townhouse from which Uranus was discovered in the back garden in 1781. “It’s a great museum.” And so she did her own orbit of space.
Readers often ask her whether Orbital was written from a position of hope or despair. It is up to us to decide, she says. “Do I have hope that the US will survive Trump, or that we will somehow live up to our responsibilities on climate change?” she asked, looking doubtful.
In the novel, the ISS is overtaken by a rocket on a new mission to the moon. She feels that the era of international cooperation is coming to an end. “I always wonder about this about the human race. When we look at the things we do for each other and the way we work together and make things happen, it’s remarkable. And very beautiful. Whether that’s enough, or whether our tendency to just grow and consume will outweigh our generosity and cooperation, I just don’t know.”
