In Praise of the Blue Planet

“ROTATING ABOUT THE EARTH in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene.” At two hundred and fifty miles above the Earth, they, six astronauts of different nationalities, circle the planet they left behind sixteen times a day, watching sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets. In the interplay of light and dark, in the airless fluidity of being alive, they experience reality as the eternity of sensory motion in which “the whip-crack of morning arrives every ninety minutes.” In Orbital, Samantha Harvey’s novel that has just won the 2024 Booker Prize, they, caught in the mysteries of microgravity, experiment with life but with the full realisation that their own life, up there, has already declared freedom from the certainties of time and biology the rest of the earthlings take for granted. Every day, fighting “the urge to dissipate,” they exercise—cycling “nowhere at twenty-three times the speed of sound on a bike that has no seat or handlebars”—within their minuscule metal world “with a close-up view of a turning planet.” And it is that view of the Earth, in its glowing enigma, that sustains their weightless existence, making them aware that they are the chosen six in a cosmic act of gratitude—and Mother Earth needs more.

Harvey’s novel, in a little over hundred pages, is a lyrical portrait of the Earth as seen from the distance of exhilarating detachment, for a space traveller overcomes the weightlessness of the present by surrendering to the weight of memory. Harvey’s astronauts, four men and two women, even as they circle the Earth, withstanding the disintegration of time and the inscrutability of space, listen to the whispers from below, forming a new intimacy with the planet. With fewer words and so much poetic elegance, and no plot to propel the pages, what Harvey creates in Orbital is the miniaturisation of the cosmic wonder. Perhaps it requires reminders from Earth, transmitted across space and time subverted by perception, to cherish a life forever indebted to the patience of a planet, its beauty multiplying in the spacewalker’s eyes. Take the night view: “There is something so crisp and clear and purposeful about the earth by night, its thick embroidered urban tapestries.” Before their eyes, continents drift past in a dazzling defiance of distance, typhoons and other ferocities of nature cross borders with ease, and cities shift and shimmer between light and dark. Measure my mysteries—it is a challenge and an invitation from the Earth the inhabitants of a space station can’t resist.

Harvey has placed her imagination, as if in a trance of inspiration and incantation, in the grand void to tell the story of the Earth. All the while swinging between the psychedelic reality of being unearthed and the enchantment of seeing and remembering, the astronauts never fail to feel the orbit of politics that animates the Earth story. The politics of want, as Harvey says: “The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.” Everything that the astronauts see as a moving mélange of memory is also a testament of the human urge for more of the same.

Inside the space station, the urge is replaced by a meditative retreat into themselves. The six, representing Russia, America, Italy and Japan, cease to be national entities as their life, rotating the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour, becomes a lighter, abridged version of humanity itself. Up there, what matters is not their separateness but their togetherness in internalising the epic far below, their shared inheritance. Identities dissolve in the wonder that they never let go. Orbital is a finely chiselled parable of our indebtedness to the planet, the story of which cannot be told in a lifetime—just be modest enough to comprehend it as much as you can. The untold story is the space-dwellers’ lifeline. For one of them, the déjà vu of a spacewalk is perhaps “caused by untapped memories of being in the womb. That is what being floating in space feels like for me…Being not yet born.” Life was yesterday, on Earth. And the future beckons from below. Celestial epiphanies only underline the worth of being human. In space, God is visible only in your longing for the blue planet.

With Orbital, the Booker regains its old reputation of celebrating the boldest forms of imagination. An English novelist has taken a cosmic leap to pack the entire human race into a spaceship to appreciate what it means to be born on Earth.

About The Author

S Prasannarajan

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