Review: Orbital
This is a Booker-award winning novel about 24 hours in the life of astronauts on a near future space station. The location and characters are used to literally look at our world from a higher perspective.
That is a good basis for a novel. Samantha Harvey’s prose is evocative and she does a nice job of balancing the ethereal with the mundane. The characters are drawn with a poetic blend of abstraction and specificity. She addresses the big picture of life on earth and how weird it is to work in space.
Man, that should be candy to me, but it does not quite come together. It always feels just a touch too writerly. I understand what she is aiming for in the abstraction of her characters, but instead of inhabiting that space between a living being and a symbol in a story they just seem like literary constructs.
Look, the book won a Booker prize. In general the folks who hand those out are better judges of writing than I am. But I am not a fan.