Reading group: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Clare suggested this 2024 Booker winner, and we were all very interested to read it for its unusual and extremely topical subject matter. Set on the International Space Station, it follows its sixteen orbits of the earth over a twenty-four hour period, each time moving a little more to its west. There is no plot beyond that orbital progression, but detailed descriptions of the conditions inside the craft and the day-to-day work and experience of the crew, and of the stunning views through the windows of the earth and of space, and meditations on the implications for the earth and for humanity.

There was much that impressed us - the descriptions of earth are beautiful, and the contemplations of its fate extremely moving, but several members of the group immediately questioned, as other commentators have done, if this is really a novel. There is no dramatic action. Astronauts are of course famously chosen for their coolness of mind and equable temperaments within a team. These astronauts know, for instance, that their bodies are atrophying in microgravity, and that the cells of their hearts are ageing fast, but they are sanguine about it; the Russian cosmonaut Roman picks up on his radio a woman on earth who asks him if he ever feels crestfallen or sad up there, and he finds the idea 'absurd'; within the first pages the Japanese astronaut Chie learns that her mother has died, but, neither she nor the others display any emotional reaction until, towards the end, when she speaks of her mother, the Russian Anton cries, but he and Chie have the presence of mind to catch his floating tears, since 'they're not allowed to let liquids loose in here'. The closest any of them comes to an emotion like existential fear is when one of them recalls the death of the astronauts on Challenger, and Shaun, the American, thinks 'for a split second', '...what the hell am I doing here, in a tin can in a vacuum? Four inches of titanium away from death'. But then: 'The thoughts run into a wall and expire.' John said that he'd at first decided that there was thus a lack of psychology, but had then realised that what was being portrayed was a group psychology. This was interesting, but led to a lack of conflict, which is of course the essence of dramatic action. As a result of this lack of affect and conflict, there is nothing to propel the kind of story arc we expect from a novel; instead, the book follows in shape the repetitive circular movement of the space station's orbit as the continents and seas appear again and the dawns and dusks follow fast on each others' heels. The question arises whether this is therefore a fit subject for a novel after all, and Ann said she thought it was more of a 'meditation' than a novel.

I did point out that the word 'novel' describes the adaptability and mutability of the form, so who were we to say what a novel should be? However, Ann said that even taking it just as a piece of writing she wasn't sure that she really admired the book, finding it pretentious. It hadn't struck me like that, and I found some of the passages both politically stunning and deeply moving. At one point the narrative charts the astronauts' changing attitudes to the view of the earth. Initially they are entranced by the view at night, when lights show up the evidence and pattern of human existence. But then they become taken by the daytime view, when all evidence of humanity seems bleached away, and the fundamental beauty of the 'blue marble' of the earth itself is revealed. Finally, however, they come to see the effect of human behaviour on the planet:

One day they look at the earth and they see the truth...they come to see that [politics] is a force so great that it has shaped every single thing on the surface of the earth that they had thought, from here, so human-proof.

Every swirling neon or red algal bloom in the polluted, warming, overfished Atlantic... Every retreating or retreated or disintegrating glacier...every scorched and blazing forest or bush, every shrinking ice sheet, every oil spill...the altered colour of a coastline where sea is reclaimed metre by metre and turned int land to house more and more people, or the altered contour a coastline where land is reclaimed metre by metre by the sea the doesn't car that there are more and more people in need of land...

...They come to see the politics of want. The politics of growing and getting, a billion extrapolations of the urge for more...

...The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.

(Meanwhile, they are tasked to photograph from their vantage point the biggest typhoon ever recorded, which is amassing over the Pacific and moving towards Malaysia and the Philippines.)

I was completely undone by the above passage and I said I thought that it alone was probably worth the book's Booker win. All of the group were impressed by the beauty of the descriptions of the earth and of the dawns and sunsets. 

As they reverse south the colours change, the browns lighter, the palette less sombre, a range of greens from the dark of mountainsides to the emerald of river plains to the teal of the sea.The rich purplish green of the vast Nile Delta. Brown becomes peach becomes plum. Africa beneath them in its abstract batik.The Nile is a spillage of royal-blue ink.

However, while appreciating them, Clare found them repetitive, I think, and on the whole she said she found the book boring and felt that, although it's short, it could have been half its length and she found it hard to read  - it was either Ann or Clare who said it had felt like wading through mud. One thing that really irritated Clare were the lists which the narrative frequently slips into, in particular the long list of things in a description of the development of life on earth, which culminates in this random way: 

...industrialisation, fascism...crowdfunding...FloJo...Einsten...Bob Dylan...pizza...flying...dark matter, jeans...

and so on for a whole page.

Doug really admired the descriptions of earth and space and some of the the meditations, but on the whole he agreed with all the criticisms.

Margaret said when she first read the book she had felt exactly the same as Clare  - bored - but then she read it again and liked it a lot. She had really enjoyed learning about space and the conditions on the space station, and she disagreed that there was no drama, feeling that the drama of the situation, and of earth itself was enough.

At which point we began to think about other Booker winners we had discussed and failed to appreciate as much as the judges...

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here 

Reading group: The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien

The recent death of Edna O'Brien prompted Ann to suggest this, O'Brien's first novel - and the first in a trilogy of novels about Caithleen Brady and her friend Baba (Bridget) Brennan - which caused a storm on its publication in 1960 and was banned in her native Ireland. (The trilogy, which charts their progress from their time as schoolgirls in rural Ireland to life as young women in London, is now published in one volume under the title of this first novel, The Country Girls). We spent much of our meeting discussing the reasons for the book's dramatic reception.

The book is the first-person narration of the introspective Caithleen, and begins when she is fourteen, on a summer day that will be turn out, although she doesn't yet know it, to be her last day at the village school, and 'the last day of her childhood'. She wakes to find that, once again, her feckless and violent father has failed to return home (from a no doubt drunken spree) to the farm he is letting go to ruin, and to his long-suffering wife and daughter. At school Caithleen discovers that she has won a scholarship to a convent boarding school - Baba, her close though self-centred (and sometimes even vindictive) friend will be going there too as a paying pupil. After school, when she and Baba are wandering in the village, the grocer informs Caithleen that her mother has gone on a trip, a clearly unusual event, and as a result she must go to stay with Baba's family. That evening, while she is attending a play in the village with them, news comes that Caithleen's mother (escaping with a lover, it will turn out) has drowned. After this, Caithleen lives with the Brennans for the rest of the summer, before the girls leave for the convent, and afterwards during the holidays until the two girls eventually leave for Dublin. It is during this first summer that the fourteen-year-old Caithleen first becomes involved with a married man who lives in the big house and whom the villagers call Mr Gentleman.

This last was of course scandalous enough for the Ireland of the time (indeed, even for England at the time), but as our member Ann said, the real offence of the book was its implicit critique of the Catholic Church and its hold over Irish society. The weight of its repressive dominance and the sense of stifled lives are evident in all of the vividly portrayed scenes: the oppression and dissatisfaction of the women; the repressed male sexuality that finds its escape in what we would now see as paedophilic behaviour towards young girls (Caithleen and Baba spend a great deal of time dodging kisses from older men); above all, the harsh atmosphere and treatment in the convent - against all of which the feisty Baba is compelled to rebel, with Caithleen on her coattails. Someone, I think Ann, commented that it is probably hard, from our present-day perspective, to appreciate quite the impact this book must have had at the time.

I said though that, having read the book many years ago, this time it struck me as more harrowing. I think perhaps when I was very young, closer to Caithleen's age and to the time it depicts, I took more for granted the social and religious mores it portrays. I had indeed found the book uplifting: the prose is lively - economical and witty - and the story moves along at a fast past (everyone agreed with that), and I simply rejoiced in the girls' rebellion (and was all behind Caithleen in her romantic love for Mr Gentleman). This time around however, I was deeply struck by the tragedy of it all, and, in the first part especially, moved to tears by the atmosphere of longing and loss, however shot through it is by Caithleen's moments of ecstasy and Baba's hijinks. Here's Caithleen leaving for school on that first morning and looking back at her mother for what will turn out to be the last time:

She was waving. In her brown dress she looked sad; the farther I went, the sadder she looked. Like a sparrow in the snow, brown and anxious and lonesome. It was hard to think that she got married one sunny morning in a lace dress and a floppy buttercup hat, and her eyes were moist with pleasure when now they were watery with tears.

John said he was really struck by the fact that nowadays the general behaviour of men in the book, which goes unremarked in the community, and in particular, Mr Gentleman's relationship with Caithleen, would be regarded as paedophilic, and that this, in one way, makes the book particularly shocking from a present-day perspective. 

We had gone a long way into the evening discussing the social significance of the book when I noted that we hadn't at all critiqued it as a novel. None of us four women, it turned out, had anything critical to say about this apart from the fact that we had loved the lively prose, the vividness and the way the story moves along at pace. The two men did have a slight criticism: John and Doug both felt that there was a gap in the middle of the novel. The beginning of the girls' stay at the convent is narrated in detail and told with the book's characteristic lively dramatic action. On the first night in the dormitory, Caithleen brings out a cake she has brought, but a nun enters:

"What is the meaning of this?"she asked...

"We were lonely, Sister," I said.

"You are not alone in your loneliness. Loneliness is not an excuse for disobedience"...

"What is this?" she asked, picking up one of the cups.

"A tea service, Sister. I brought it because my mother died."...

"Sentimental childish conduct," she said. She lifted the outside layer of her black habit and shaped it into a basket. Then she put the tea service in there and carried it off.

The rest of the time at school however is passed over, and, with only a fairly brief mention that in the holidays Caithleen takes secret boat trips with Mr Gentleman, the narrative fast-forwards to the day, three years later, that Baba engineers their expulsion in order to escape. Both John and Doug found this leap forward unsatisfying. The rest of us, four women, hadn't found it unsatisfying at all. Ann (who had been to boarding school) found it realistic - the first days at boarding school are seared on your mind, she said, but the rest of the time passes in a blur - and I protested that it's a perfectly acceptable novelistic convention - one of artistic selection - to pass over periods when not much happens that would be relevant to the theme or plot. But, countered Doug, he consequently found the change in Caithleen hard to take. We were taken aback by this, as we hadn't found Caithleen significantly changed beyond the kind of maturing you would expect in the three years of a girl's development. Margaret said that in fact she hadn't found her changed at all: she was still the tentative yet privately critical sidekick to Baba's exploits, and still as in thrall to Mr Gentleman.

John said that although the book has a very autobiographical feel (so that one is tempted to identify narrator Caithleen with the author), he didn't find it all that realistic that two such different girls would be such close friends. The rest of us had no problem with this - two girls of the same age in such a small place, their families connected, would be bound to gravitate together whatever their differences. However, it's true that I had read that O'Brien had once been questioned about this, and had replied that the two girls represented the two sides of herself, Baba being the side repressed by her Irish Catholic upbringing - which is itself a comment on the repressive power of the Catholic Church.

I think we all enjoyed this book and certainly appreciated the significance of its place in the canon. Ann said that having read it she could see its influence on Irish writers we had read previously, including Ann Enright and (perhaps especially, I thought: the grocery store scenes in Brooklyn seem like a development of those in The Country Girls) Colm Tobin. 

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here