'Orbital' audio: book a Booker place in space
Samantha Harvey's prize-winner set on the International Space Station leaves us part awestruck, part dangling
It was a magical moment when I first knowingly saw the International Space Station in the night sky from my south-facing balcony. My writing buddy Alan – who’d proved a reliable sounding board while I wrote my first novel, Waving, Drowning – happened to mention times and degrees of elevation for the next siting of the ISS on a clear night. It was after we’d met that evening virtually in my writing group.
I could distinguish the craft from the numerous stars visible that night for the obvious reason it was moving steadily while they were static. And you can tell it’s not a plane as the clear white reflection of the sun on its solar panels isn’t accompanied by the red and green wingtip lights of an identified flying object!
So when I heard Samantha Harvey had won this year’s Booker Prize with her novel Orbital set on the ISS I was immediately curious about it. My dark yet now open secret is I’m a very slow reader and I have a notional queue of books to read as long as your arm already, independent of the fact that at 136 pages Orbital isn’t exactly War and Peace.
Salvation came with BBC Radio 4’s serialisation in 5 x 14-minute instalments*. Sadly this won’t be available outside limited time windows – less than a month as I write – but it has already been out earlier this year, so what goes around comes around, like a...
If only I could think of something rotating to use as a simile.
The opening paragraph reads:
Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams – of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses. Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.
[via the Booker Prizes website]
The space between your ears
Strictly speaking this is my review of the BBC’s adaptation of Orbital, hence the ‘audio’ in my headline, rather than the entire book. But after nearly an hour and a quarter’s listening, especially as it’s based on such a small tome, and because the abridger Sara Davies will doubtless have sought passages which are representative, I believe I have gained a good impression of the book and can give an informed opinion on both the audio and the writing.
I should point out at this stage that the BBC Audio production is not the same as the Penguin Books audiobook, of which there’s a free five-minute sample here.
Overall mine is an upbeat assessment.
As you may have already discerned from the first paragraph excerpt above the language is poetic and, dare one say, ‘spaced out’. It derives its licence from the unique subject matter, and genuinely seems unshackled from the gravitational pull of more conventional genres, whether boy/girl meets girl/boy, art heist, courtroom drama, action adventure or whatever else.
Positive reviewers of the work frequently resort to the word ‘beautiful’ to describe it.
Silky exactitude
The narrator, Scottish-Sri Lankan actress Anneika Rose, brings warmth and precision to the text, a silky exactitude, along with an enthusiasm which conveys a sense of wonder. In this, incidentally, she’s far more engaging and engaged with the material in my view than the more declamatory Sarah Naudi in the full-length audiobook. But that may be due to a difference in direction rather than anything innate to their performing styles.
Timothy X Atack’s restlessly undulating strings of the opening, closing and punctuating music are rich yet economical and add to the atmosphere (pun only half intentional).
The focus shifts variously from gym activity designed to counter the astronaut’s muscle wastage, which is an intrinsic consequence of being in microgravity, to numerous experiments, whether on mice, viruses, funghi, bacteria – or themselves. And we’re kept in the loop, as t’were, as to which of the 16 orbits within a single Earth day they’re on.
But there is a ‘but’.
A spacecraft without a driver
My antennae were alerted prior to hearing this series by listening to another book-related Radio 4 show, the perpetually strong A Good Read, presented by Harriet Gilbert. The conceit is that the two different guests each week, plus the presenter, bring along a book they’ve enjoyed for all three of them to read and discuss. Harriet chose Orbital in a recent edition.
One of the guests, Anglo-French comedian Tatty Mcleod, said she felt like she was ‘reading the set design as opposed to really being in the story’. Furthermore she had ‘no impulse to turn the page’.
And that touches on the central problem, or to be more generous perhaps, the limitation of this book and/or its subject matter: we’re just floating above the fray, never quite fully engaging with the characters on anything beyond a clinical level. You can almost see the strip lights giving a bland wash to everyone’s faces, but never quite illuminating into the lines on their face or getting beyond the superficial.
A case in point, and this is no spoiler as it’s in the blurb, one of the six loses her mother while on a typical nine-month mission. But instead of hearing how that feels and being introduced to the deceased through memories and reflections, we just hear that the planet the ISS is hovering over is her mother now.
Have you ever heard of someone losing a parent who thinks like that?
Perspective shift
You could imagine the author countering, ‘Well we can’t pop down to Earth for more detail because that would break the spell’.
Except Harvey does exactly that in the case of a typhoon. It’s a rare example of a strand which develops over time within the book. There’s a perspective shift (or ‘cheat’ if you want to be more brutal) so that we see children cowering in a group in fear of their lives it seems, among other dramatic and destructive effects of the natural phenomenon.
But even this, while earthbound, has the feel to me of seeing it through the camera lens of a rolling news TV channel, not of experiencing it firsthand.
Magic mouse carpets
At one stage the hapless caged mice on board appear to have learnt to fly in microgravity. It’s an arresting image, likened to magic flying carpets, but I did find myself wondering whether the little furry creatures were being set up as a metaphor; the lab rat astronauts learning to, paradoxically, find a semblance of freedom within captivity.
Their equivalents on the Apollo lunar mission of the ’60s and ’70s were disparagingly, and probably enviously described as ‘spam in a can’.
One of the strongest images that’s stayed with me from this apparently well-researched book is a picture of all of the astronauts falling asleep in front of a space-related movie on their big screen, their arms floating above their heads as they bob about while upright.
For all the strength, bravery, poetry and ambition of this original idea of accomplished writer Samantha Harvey, which I would still recommend sampling in audio or book form, I’m sorry to say I felt like one of those somnambulant flight engineers.
I was left dozy and dangling.
*There may be geographical limitations to listening outside the UK, as well as the time limitations
Book credits:
‘Orbital’ by Samantha Harvey
Published by Random House/Vintage imprint at £9.99 for the paperback in the UK
BBC Audio credits:
Read by Anneika Rose (Line of Duty, Shetland, Ackley Bridge) with music by Timothy X Atack
Abridged by Sara Davies
Studio Recording and Mixing by Ilse Lademann and Michael Harrison
Produced by Mary Ward-Lowery and Mair Bosworth for BBC Audio