Samantha Harvey very nearly gave up on her novel Orbital, which last night won this year’s Booker prize. Set on the International Space Station (ISS) 250 miles from Earth, Orbital follows the day-to-day lives of four astronauts and two cosmonauts as they hurtle through the universe at 17,500mph. She was a few thousand words in and suddenly lost her nerve. She felt she was trespassing in space. “I am so spectacularly not an astronaut,” she laughs, when we meet for coffee the morning after the Booker ceremony. “I’m so unadventurous, so unaudacious, so impractical, cowardly, anxious. I would be terrible.”
After a few months of dabbling with other ideas, she opened the abandoned word document on her computer by mistake. When she read it she found it had an integrity and pulse that drew her more than any of the other projects she was working on. “I thought, ‘I shouldn’t be afraid of this. If I can do it in a way that’s different to the way astronauts write about their time in space, then maybe there’s something here.” So she climbed back in and achieved lift-off.
Described as both “this generation’s Virginia Woolf” and “a kind of Melville of the skies”, Harvey was the only British author on this year’s Booker shortlist. Orbital, her fifth novel, is a beautiful, powerful and utterly original work of fiction. It takes place over one day, but time is different in space, where “the whipcrack of morning arrives every ninety minutes” and the sun is “up-down-up-down like a mechanical toy”. Each of the 16 chapters records a single orbit of Earth. Mundane tasks – vacuuming the capsule, monitoring mice and microbes – are set against the munificence of the universe. One of the toilets is always blocked. A super-typhoon is gathering over the Philippines. Each of the six characters are given only slivers of backstory: Chie’s mother has died; Anton has fallen out of love with his wife; Shaun longs for his.
While it might be set in space, its subject is Earth. It is a 136-page love letter to our troubled planet – she calls it “space pastoral”, a kind of nature writing of the universe. “I wanted to write a celebration of the Earth’s beauty, but with a sense of sorrow or a pang of loss because of what we’re doing to it,” she says. Softly spoken, with a cloud of fair hair and delicate features, Harvey has an ethereal, otherworldly quality. She doesn’t have a mobile phone, dumb or otherwise, let alone a social media account.
She lives in a 16th-century house in a village on the Wiltshire-Somerset borders. “I could always retreat more,” she jokes. For years, she has been taking life-sculpture classes and there is a lifesize statue of her partner (who is 6ft 2in), which she has tried to hide behind bushes in the back garden. She writes in a “cold, decrepit, fusty, old room” they haven’t got round to decorating. She is as serious, sincere and slightly strange – in a good way – as her fiction, with such a gentle and unassuming manner as to never seem preachy.
Although Harvey isn’t religious herself, she does return to faith in her fiction (only glancingly in Orbital). “Now that we live in such a secular society,” she says, “where do we get our big philosophical ideas from? Where do we find meaning?” From a retired architect’s descent into Alzheimer’s in her acclaimed 2009 first novel The Wilderness, to “the medieval murder mystery” of The Western Wind in 2018, Harvey has explored philosophical questions of being, time, faith and memory in her fiction, which also includes All Is Song (2012) and Dear Thief (2014). With each novel she has broached new ground formally. But it is her 2020 memoir of her year-long struggle with insomnia, The Shapeless Unease, with which she feels Orbital has most in common – her own cyclical bouts of darkness and distorted time, not so dissimilar to that experienced by the astronauts.
“I pretty much hit 40 and became anxious,” she says. “I don’t know why. I think maybe I just decided it was time to have some sort of crisis.” Suddenly, she could no longer sleep. “I was finding the world kind of abrasive. Everything was too noisy and too busy and too huge.”
She found her escape both in front of her nose and 250 miles away. She takes the idea of an armchair traveller to a new frontier, spending “thousands and thousands” of hours orbiting the globe in cyberspace. Her sleeplessness also gave her a heightened sense of happiness and joy, and it was from this euphoric place – “almost like being in love” – that she set out to write Orbital. Insomnia even changed how she writes: both her memoir and Orbital were completed in short, concentrated bursts. That way “everything feels much more urgent”.
Although she started Orbital before the pandemic, most of it was written during lockdown. She always had footage from the International Space Station playing on her desktop. “It was enormous consolation to me to be able to go to space every day, virtually in my imagination,” she says. “When I’m down here on Earth, I find it difficult to be consoled by the things that we’re doing to the Earth and to one another. But when I zoom out, I can feel something that more resembles peace. I can look at it almost without judgment, just look at its beauty.”
She wasn’t a space nerd as a child. She grew up in Kent and then “all over the place”, in what she describes as “a working-class”, not particularly bookish, household. Her father was a builder and her mother stayed at home, until her parents divorced when she was 10. Her mother became a ghostwriter, which had a profound influence on her. “I would see her there, day after day, hour after hour, at her computer, just doing this mysterious thing, just writing,” she recalls.
Like many children of the 80s, Harvey remembers the 1986 Challenger rocket disaster – poignantly mentioned in the novel. The family visited the Nasa Space Centre in Houston on a holiday to Texas, and there are photos of her as a girl in front of giant rockets. Where other teenagers amassed Duran Duran posters, she started collecting quotes by astronauts. “I’ve always been into these big philosophical, or sentimental, gestures about things.”
Many years later, when she was writing her first (still unpublished) novel and while she finished The Wilderness, she had an admin job at the Herschel Museum of Astronomy in Bath, a Georgian townhouse from which Uranus was discovered in the back garden in 1781. “It is a wonderful museum.” And so she did her own orbit of space.
Readers often ask her if Orbital is written from a position of hope or despair. That is up to us to decide, she says. “Do I have hope that the US will survive Trump, or that we will somehow step up to our responsibilities vis-a-vis climate change?” she asks, looking doubtful.
In the novel, the ISS is passed by a rocket on a new mission to the moon. She feels that the era of international cooperation is coming to an end. “I always marvel at this about the human race. When we look at the things we do for one another and the way that we work together and make things happen, it’s remarkable. And very beautiful. Whether that’s enough, or whether our tendency towards just growing and consuming will outweigh our generosity and cooperation, I just don’t know.”
Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Vintage, £9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
