Booker Prize finalist: Orbital finds beauty in the stillness of space

EARLY on in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, a character speculates on the focal subject of Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas – a painting well-known for its plays of perspective and suggestions of self-consciousness, and which offers something worth pondering, whichever part of the image the viewer chooses to look.

Her book evokes these same qualities. It follows a multinational group of astronauts over the course of 24 hours, during which their spacecraft makes 16 orbits round Earth. Their observations and reflections, rather than a plot, make up the novel’s substance.

The narrative perspective is as weightless as its subjects, flitting freely among the viewpoints of the individual astronauts, and zooming out at times to consider them as a collective, all the while checking in on their inner lives as they go about the day and regard the blue sphere before them.