Booker-winner Samantha Harvey is part philosopher, part poet of the Earth
It’s a coincidence that I’m reading Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital at the same time as another member of the family is digging into the author’s earlier book The Western Wind.
This offers the rare opportunity to discuss the work of an author who has received several awards and been shortlisted many times over for her five novels.
To Ms Harvey’s distinguished roll call of awards can now be added the ultimate update: Orbital has won the Booker Prize.
Another coincidence soon after Orbital won the Booker: my doctor saw me with the book and told me her view of it. (She said she loved the map on the first page, which allowed her to understand where, over Earth, the spacecraft was flying. And she cleaved to the fantastic descriptions of what the astronauts were seeing down on Earth as their craft went in and out of different orbits.)
Speaking to two other readers — in real time- of Samatha Harvey means I’ve been able to check my own response to her writing in real time.
Everyone agrees Ms Harvey is a fine writer with a worldview that’s finely attuned to something that I think is like Gaia, ie that all living things interact with their inorganic surroundings to create a synergy that must not be disturbed.
Equally, everyone agrees that Ms Harvey doesn’t seem all that interested in telling narrative stories about actual human lives. And in Orbital, she seems particularly keen to examine how human lives intersect with that of the planet. It is a thin book (the librarian almost didn’t find it on the shelf, saying she expected it to be much more substantial). However, it has a bulky agenda. The novel looks up into the sky; then from space down upon the earth. And then, it looks all around. Crucially, it looks inside — within us, we humans.
It examines, for instance, big questions such as the difference between a work of art and that of nature. On pages 44 and 45 of my paperback edition from the library, Orbital discusses the view of an astronaut, Nell, as she floats around the spacecraft, aware of the solar systems and galaxies so “violently scattered” through the world as we know it.
“What made that but some heedless beautiful force?” wonders Nell.
And then she factors in the view of another person called Shaun. He would say, she thinks, “what made that but some heed ful hurling beautiful force?”
Nell wonders: “Is that all the difference there is between their views, then — a bit of heed? Is Shaun’s universe just the same as hers but made with care, to a design? Hers an occurrence of nature and his an artwork? The difference seems both trivial and insurmountable….It’s barely any difference at all, and the profoundest difference in the world”.
Samantha Harvey is part philosopher, part poet of the Earth.
Originally published at https://www.rashmee.com
