Booker Prize

Review: Orbital

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Cover image of "Orbital" by Samantha Harvey

Orbital, Samantha Harvey. Grove Press (ISBN: 9780802163622) 2024.

Summary: A day aboard the International Space Station as six people recount their work, weightlessness, and the wonder of earth below.

Between the end of October and now, Orbital won the Booker and Hawthornden Prizes and was shortlisted for several others. In addition, it was designated a “Best Book of the Year” by Oprah Daily, Financial Times, and The Guardian. As I read the book, I wondered whether it was deserving of so much recognition.

For those not familiar with the book, it is a fictional account of a day aboard the International Space Station through the eyes of six people. During this time they orbit earth sixteen times. The chapters trace ascending and descending orbits. There is no plot. Rather, we glimpse what they are thinking and feeling, what life in zero gravity is like, their work and interactions through the day, and what they see of the planet that is home for the rest of us.

I noted what so many reviewers have commented upon–the sheer beauty of what it is like to see our home from 250 miles up, circling it at over 17,000 miles per hour. They witness multiple sunrises, and transitions to night, the city lights of their homes, and the variety of colors of earth’s varied land- and seascape. They see landmasses without borders. From space, they cannot see another human besides those on the crew. But they witness the effects of human activity–fires in the Amazon, algal blooms fed by fertilizers, and much more.

They follow a forming typhoon developing into a category five superstorm. One of the crew had stayed with a family on the Philippine coast toward which it is heading. There is concern for their safety, amplified by the vision of the sheer immensity of the typhoon.

One example of her descriptions is her account of the aurora borealis:

“The airglow is dusty greenish yellow. Beneath it in the gap between atmosphere and earth is a fuzz of neon which starts to stir. It ripples, spills, it’s smoke that pours across the face of the planet; the ice is green, the underside of the spacecraft an alien pall. The light gains edges and limbs, folds and opens. Strains against the inside of the atmosphere, writhes and flexes. Sends up plumes. Fluoresces and brightens. Detonates then in towers of light. Erupts clean through the atmosphere and puts up towers two hundred miles high. At the top of the towers is a swathe of magenta that obscures the stars…”

It might look something like this:

Aurora borealis from the International Space Station. An European Space Agency photograph
ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO, via Wikimedia Commons

By contrast, the descriptions of daily life, apart from a space walk, are startlingly ordinary. Working out to maintain muscle tone, preparing food, cleaning, emptying trash, running experiments, communicating with those back on earth. Essentially, it is an experience of transcendence amid the ordinary. Another paradox is the utter dependence these six have on each other, and yet the bounded privacy they observe. In particular, the narration takes us into the private thoughts and dreams of the crew.

They live with the precarity of their own situation. A hairline crack is slowly growing in the Russian module. A thin metal skin protects them from annihilation. But they also recognize another form of precarity–that of life on earth with its thin envelope of atmosphere as well as the unfolding changes being wrought by human activity, visible even from their vantage point.

So is this plotless work of fiction worth all the attention? I’ll be honest and say I’ve read better fiction and this won’t be my “best of the year.” The novel is uneven–some parts soaring with rapturous description, and some just ho-hum–just a list of all the places they are seeing. Actually, the account of life on board the station is interesting–all the ways they adapt to weightlessness, including learning to sleep. I also found the characters of interest–each had interesting back stories and interior lives and reactions to their experiences. All were transformed by seeing the earth from space.

You may find this amazing. I found it interesting but not amazing. I hope the success won’t hurt Harvey. There are flashes of brilliance here, and an imaginative conception in the book as a whole. But I think and hope her best books may be yet to be written.

Review: Prophet Song

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Prophet Song, Paul Lynch. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023.

Summary: A mother tries to hold her family and life together as Ireland descends into authoritarian rule.

Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, winner of the 2023 Booker Prize is a tough read in two respects. One is seeing the unraveling of a democratic society through the disbelieving eyes of Eilish stack, an educated, middle class mother who works for a biotech company. It is disturbing becausew of how close to home it strikes.

The other respect is the text, written without paragraphs with dialogue without quotation marks. Yet this running text reflects increasingly unsettled and anxious perceptions of Eilish, fusing dialogue, emotions, and interior thought. We sense her movement back and forth from disbelief to concern, from hollow assurances that even her children don’t believe to rising fear, from clinging to the hope that her “disappeared” will come home to the realization that no one taken by the government comes home, from the illusion that she can preserve her home and way of life and that their only hope is flight. It’s the increasingly frantic and instinctive thought of one who loses husband, two sons, her job, her respect as “traiter” is spray-painted on her car and home, as her neighborhood becomes a battleground between the regime and the resistance, and finally her flight with her daughter and infant son, having to pay “fees” at numerous checkpoints as she they try to flee. The running text takes us inside her mind and we live the growing terror with Eilish.

It all begins when the National Alliance Party takes over the Republic of Ireland, declares emergency powers and suspends the constitution including writs of habeas corpus. The reality comes home when her husband Larry, a leader in a teacher’s union, goes out to a protest–and never returns. Her eldest son Mark has to go into hiding to avoid the drafting of 17 year-olds. He joins the resistance. After infrequent communications on burner phones, Eilish hears no more, but persists in hoping he will come home. Then, after a list of draft-dodgers, including her son, is published, she learns her services are no longer required. Meanwhile, her father, across town, is descending into dementia. Yet, in his occasional lucid moments, he tells her she must take the children and leave.

Subsequently, her neighborhood becomes front lines in the battle between the Party and the resistance. Power and water are intermittent and the gone. Buildings around suffer bombardment. Yet she uses all her resources, including money from her sister for her to get out of the country to survive. She can’t let go of hope that her husband and son will come home. Only when another son goes missing does she realize that she must save the two who remain–if she can.

The story takes us into the powerful disbelief that democracy really can’t unravel and how rapidly a society can consume itself when it does. We also see how powerful the urge is to try to hold onto home, onto some shred of normalcy. We glimpse how bad things must get for someone to flee from home and become a refugee. When Eilish’s neighborhood becomes a warzone, her running narrative gives the reader of what lived reality must be like in Gaza and other warzones.

Paul Lynch takes us to a place those of us in the West resist going. We join Eilish in denial that it can happen here–that our institutions, the rule of law, our education, jobs, and suburbs will protect us. He forces us to look into the dark abyss through the eyes of Eilish to recognize the vulnerability of all of this when we embrace unfettered power rather than the less “efficient” processes of the rule of law and democratic legislative processes. His book reminds us that the possibility of effective resistance after the fact is far more perilous than resisting beforehand, as inconvenient as that may be. Is this book a “Prophet Song” for us?

Review: Midnight’s Children

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Midnight's Children

Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie. New York: Random House, 1981 (25th Anniversary Edition, 2006).

Summary: Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight when India won its independence. He believes his life is “twinned” with the fate of the country, even as he is telepathically linked with the other “midnight children”, all of whom have unusual powers.

Salman Rushdie is a native of India of Muslim descent most often known for his book The Satanic Verses, the publication of which resulted in a fatwa calling for his assassination. Since 2000, he has lived in New York City. This novel, his second, brought him to the attention of the literary world and was awarded the Booker Prize and was selected one of the hundred best novels of all time by the Modern Library.

The central figure, Saleem Sinai, is narrating his life to Padma, “the pickle woman” who is taking care of him. Central to his life story is that he was born at the stroke of midnight at the moment India gained its Independence. He sees himself as a twin with India, and that his experiences and actions are intertwined with that of the country. His life and family dysfunctions and travails parallel those of India. In his personal history, he gets caught up in the Indo-Pakistan wars and Bangladeshi independence.

He and the other babies born in the first hour of Independence all have unusual powers. Saleem’s is the ability to telepathically link them together in the “Midnight Children’s Conference” where they deliberate how they might use their powers in their young country. The hopeful promise of these children is not attained, and one, Shiva, who was switched with Saleem at birth is a destroyer, symbolized by his powerful knees, while Saleem’s sensitivities are symbolized by his nose that can sniff out not only smells but dispositions and longings.

Rushdie writes in the genre of magical realism, similar to Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. Noses, knees, serpents, and impotent men recur through the book. When Saleem’s wife goes into labor, at the beginning of the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi, she labors thirteen days, until the emergency lifts. In all of this, the life story of Saleem is mystically linked with the nation.

The challenge in reading this work is both remembering this connection and understanding the history of India during the time spanned by the novel (1947 to 1979). One wishes, particular in the newer edition, that it would have been annotated for those not deeply acquainted with this history. Rushdie himself observes that western readers tend to read this novel as fantasy while readers from India see the book as almost a history.

We trace the central figure from the hopefulness and growing awareness of boyhood to a growing sense of pathos, sadness and, indeed impotence, perhaps reflecting the frustration of India’s hopes, particularly during the Indira Gandhi rule. A life story, that of its own seems sad, and at points dysfunctional, in fact becomes commentary for the early years of India’s statehood. Sadly, this narrative could be the story of many post-colonial states. But Saleem has a son, and perhaps a new generation…. Perhaps.