This year’s Booker winner is a smart novel – but the wrong choice
It shouldn’t have been a surprise. This year’s Booker Prize was awarded to Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, a chronicle of one day on the International Space Station, as lived by six astronauts. On the eve of the Prize, many critics – me among them – were tipping Percival Everett’s James. Yet Orbital was outselling its rivals, and when the betting closed, Ladbrokes had Harvey and Everett jostling for pole. Last year, the same bookies correctly predicted victory for Paul Lynch, to the horror of anyone who could read. Critics, as Auden didn’t quite say, make nothing happen.
Orbital is no bad winner. It sketches the personalities of its crew with ease, from Chie, anxious and sensitive, to Shaun, soothing and wry; within a few pages, Harvey draws six characters of equal weight, and keeps them distinct through a novel light on plot. They fix equipment; they exercise; they peer down at Earth. So much rests on Harvey’s descriptions, and her resources run pretty deep. As the ISS sweeps around the Earth, orbiting 16 times in 24 hours at a 14,500mph that feels like nothing, the crew slide over daylit clouds that are “wind-warped and ribbony and travelling”; they stare at sleeping Australian cities lit “in delicate brocade”.
But the novel’s strength is also its curse. To call it a majestic failure would be too strong, but there’s something hollow beneath the style. I defer to our critic, Lucy Scholes, who marvelled at Harvey’s powers, but when I read this depiction of Earth – “a hunk of tourmaline, no a cantaloupe, an eye, lilac orange almost mauve white magenta bruised textured shellac-ed splendour” – I think: Well, yes and no. To add metaphors isn’t to enrich a depiction, any more than layers of paint make a picture clearer; it just floods your (inner) eye. But the novel goes on like this, orbit after orbit, wondering anew at the same indescribable world.
(And while some critics have said Orbital has the ring of poetry, that its language is “lyrical”, I’m unconvinced. British poetry has a long history with outer space, from John Milton and Lucy Hutchinson to the likes of Peter Manson; the best have confronted its rawness, its strangeness, in more than just flowing adjectives. No lush phrase in Harvey compares to the eeriness of Satan soaring through vacuum in Paradise Lost.)
Meanwhile, you ask what Percival Everett needs to do. James wasn’t even his finest novel – that may be Erasure – and yet it was still the book of the year. It takes Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and rewrites it, causing merry chaos, finding within “Jim”, Twain’s slave, a deadpan hero who hides his eloquence from his “masters” and, with Huck in tow, embarks on a trip down the Mississippi that veers from excruciating comedy to heartbreaking pain. It’s a story about storytelling: an intelligent, agile joy. And just as much exuberance bursts from what had seemed James’s principal rival: Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, in which a drunken spy penetrates a group of French activists led by a reclusive guru, and, whether they’re bent on sex or sabotage, everyone smells of fraud.
Still, draw back a little, and there are virtues to Orbital’s win. It’s among the shortest champions in Booker history, at 136 pages, and in an age too soft on the literary brick – the “magisterial”, “epic” 500-pager – Harvey has taken up arms with excellent writers from Sarah Bernstein to Anita Desai. She was also the only Briton on the shortlist, and while Everett and Kushner should be judged on their merits, I can’t feel too incensed at the defeat of two big Americans by a Briton who isn’t yet on household lips.
Fundamentally, though, Everett and Kushner succeed where Harvey does not. They’ve grasped the fact that novels stand or fall on tone; that tone is a matter of human perspective, and thus human imagination; and that where the tones of James and Creation Lake have plenty to play with – the slapstick cruelties of 19th-century slavery; the delicious suspicions of espionage – Orbital is never sure what it wants to say. It’s pinched between the weird banality of making chicken cassoulet from a packet, and the majestic task of framing the universe. The issue of creationism arises – Shaun is a Christian – but doesn’t stick; nor does the motif of climate change, incarnated in a supertyphoon that appears below and threatens millions of lives.
Early on, Harvey imagines “an alien civilisation” looking at the ISS and asking why it’s there. “The earth,” she writes, “is the answer to every question. The earth is the face of an exulted lover… The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return.” The Earth could, you think, be anything. And, in a sense, it is: it’s the sum total of all human history, society and life. Space, at the same time, seems incalculable, both zero and infinity. Orbital, in the end, isn’t equal to all this. It tries to go somewhere I’m unsure it can.