Six astronauts rotate in a spacecraft above Earth, conducting experiments and collecting data. They circle the planet sixteen times, seeing sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets. The “whip-crack of morning” arrives every ninety minutes. In the span of a day, they cross five continents, see autumn and spring, glaciers and deserts, wilderness and war zones.
Harvey builds up a stunning montage of images, structured around these orbits. There’s “Santiago on South America’s approaching coast in a cloud-hazed burn of gold.” On another, the “Saharan dust sweeps to the sea in a hundred-mile ribbon.” There’s the exhilaration of auroras, the rapture of spacewalk. The imagery is vivid, and reinforces the vastness and varied topography of the planet.
You can’t, however, escape life, even in outer space. The death of Chie’s mother hangs over them, making them look at the revolving mass with longing. The word that keeps coming back to them is mother, Mother Earth. An impending typhoon and moon landing come as additional reminders of their own precarious existence; where a single misstep could lead to disaster. “A tinned man in a tin can,” as Shaun puts it.
Out there, in the expanse, there are no boundaries, just a “rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war”. Their thoughts circle their families, ambitions, humanity, politics, God, the past and the future. We barely touch the astronauts’ lives, but the fleeting glimpses leave us with a range of emotions. Stillness, anxiety, depression, tenderness, anger, hope, despair — in less than 150 pages we go through them all, sensing that at the core, our thoughts follow a similar trajectory.
The ecstasy of space comes with its own hurdles. Space shreds time to pieces. So in their closeted, hanging quarters, their days revolve around tasks and schedules. Exercises to stave off muscle atrophy, hours when their bodies are not suspended but forced to comply with gravity. Experiments, repairs, photographs, eating, cleaning – the whole rigmarole of existence. Despite the frailty of human life, the Earth, from their vantage point, flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour, without which there is no life. Orbital is a stunning book that’s hard to absorb all at once. It demands attention but leaves you richer for the same.
Ps: Orbital is part of our Hope Box till September end. Write to us at thousandmornings@gmail.com to order or for more details.
A Thousand Mornings 