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The political choices we make in the way that we live on the planet and the things that we vote for and the things that we buy and the things that we do are sculpting the surface of the earth. That's Samantha Harvey, winner of the 2020 Booker Prize with her novel, Orbital.
I wanted to memorialise those last few years of what has been an era of peaceful cooperation between nations that has been symbolised by this incredible spacecraft. This is if we're no longer going to be attentive to this planet, but just trying to exploit the Moon and Mars for private gain, not for the good of humanity as much as Elon Musk might tell us it is.
I'm Tom Gatti and you're listening to Culture from The New Statesmen, our weekly podcast exploring the cultural moments that define our world. In Samantha Harvey's novel Orbital, six astronauts orbit the Earth 16 times in a single day. Their journey is captured in a richly descriptive work that is slim in form but epic in scope, viewing the Earth and the politics that shape it from a distance of 250 miles.
In this episode, my new statesman colleague Nicholas Harris sits down with Samantha Harvey to discuss the origins of her work and whether she considers it a political novel. You can read Nick's write-up of their conversation on the New Statesman website at the link in the show notes. Here's Nick.
Congratulations on the win. I thought we'd start off by talking about kind of the origins of the writing process of the novel. And then you said you started writing it before lockdown and then returned to it in lockdown itself. And I was wondering what the first scene was that you wrote and what the initial vision you had for the book that then it came from.
That's a good question. I'm not entirely sure I remember the first scene, but the book had different iterations before it became the thing it is now, and it was written originally over the period of a month rather than a day.
So I think I began roughly in the same place that the book begins now with them waking up in the morning of a new day. But then the book continued for the consecutive days until I realized it needed to just be over one day. And that was the kind of structure that it required. So I think that I began in roughly the same place. It's just I ended up somewhere very different. I'm ready that single day structure come from in that case. If that wasn't there at the conception,
I was really struggling with the book, so I'd written the whole draft and the time frame at that point was about a month and I really wasn't working and I wasn't sure what wasn't working. So I kept changing the voice and new things and then I had a conversation with a friend who is a writer and he was asking me questions about it and I was saying I think it's about time and the kind of upended experience of time when you are in orbit.
And in the process of talking about that I think I realized that, of course, I could instead of just talking about how time is upended and exploded, I could encode that into the structure of the book by just setting it over one day and making a far more elegant form.
And it also meant that I didn't have to keep dealing with multiple breakfast times and lunch times and all that endless housekeeping they have to do. And I could just compress all those ideas into one sort of actual, but also symbolic day. I mean, I think you said somewhere that 10p could praise your portrayal of space, life, how they sleep, how they eat, the structure of the space station, all that sort of thing. So how much knowledge gathering was there before? What would you do during the writing process as well?
a huge amount. Yeah, I don't ever want to be enslaved to research, but I love research. And I do think if you're going to write about something, particularly something as kind of specific and particular as space and the ISS, then you ought to really meet your subject matter halfway. I mean, that's just courtesy to it.
I really wanted to get things right, but also it's a pleasure to research. It's so creatively rich because it's full of surprises and it's full of things unfamiliar to us, but also things are tantalizingly familiar as well. There's a lot of just dusting and vacuuming in space and a lot of housekeeping and so I love the way you've got this very mundane and extraordinary.
all the time up against one another or coexisting with each other. So I loved the research and I loved figuring out how I could build the research into the novel and how particular things that I'd found out might kind of change the course of the book or give me ideas about what I wanted to do with it.
And that premise, that just the notion of I want to see something in space, where do I come from? Well, I'm not sure. I feel like I should know this, but the more I think about it, the less clear it becomes in a way. I think I knew that I wanted to write about the earth, and I wanted to write something
that was about the natural world and about our human relationship to it or more specifically as with my own relationship to it and my feelings of both wonder and the sense of its beauty and also the sorrow and the sense of the loss of innocence and the fact that we are kind of quite systematically destroying it and I was trying to find angles from which to write about that.
and somehow ended up just moving further and further away from the surface of the earth and then being very enchanted by images of the earth from space and beginning to see that there was something there that could form a novel. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, well, you know, we don't write about space as a lived environment, we write about it in terms of sci-fi and it's all very dramatic and conflict driven and epic.
And actually, everything that happens daily on the ISS is the opposite of that. It's all about trying to minimize conflict and trying to very much minimize drama and no catastrophe, you know, just getting on with each other, even at a surface level, but finding ways to coexist.
Could I write a book that tried to capture that domestic life in an extraordinary environment to create a propulsive narrative that didn't depend upon conflict and disaster? It's not the only prize this book, so I'm sure it's also legislative for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. I think the book has quite clear politics, though given universal acclaim for it from every angle. It's a politics that we all agree on, I think, which is the
the politics of the planet crisis and what's happened to the world. How vivid in your head is what you were trying to say there? What politics were you trying to dramatize to the novelist that makes sense? I didn't really want the book to be overtly political because I wanted to create
a novel that felt visual, I suppose, so that I could try to say with words, here is what our planet looks like, and here is what we have, and here is what is at stake, and relieve the extrapolation of that to the reader, and you bring to it, whatever you bring to it. And it's not really a book about climate change, although I feel happy for it to be read in that way.
I think in some ways, you know, as time goes on, I finished this book quite a long time ago, as time goes on, I feel more kind of spirited about the questions of climate change. And I'm not sure I could have made this a new thought to me. So I'm kind of thinking on my feet, but I'm not sure I could write a book that was as, it's not neutral on the subject of climate change, but I was trying to withhold judgment just to look.
And I think now I feel that we must act and it doesn't feel that just looking anymore is enough. But in terms of it's over kind of political appeal, I don't really want to. I want to leave it in the eye of the beholder that you take from it or whatever it is you take from it.
It is very delicately balanced. It's not a manifesto at all, I think. But there are certain points. I mean, I think it's pages 74 and 75. I remember that because it's felt structural. It was halfway through. There is a sort of proration about how you might like to think of politics as a noise above events and then you see the impact. That's the closest it got to making a statement. Did that reflect how you feel about politics and relationship to the actual world?
Yeah, very much. It's interesting that's about halfway through. I don't know. I want to say that was a conscious thing, but I'm not sure it was. I mean, I don't know what it's like for the astronauts who are up there, I'm having to kind of guess and imagine. But when I was looking at images of the Earth from space and spending hours and hours looking at them, at first it just looks like this kind of perfect virgin planet, this beautiful glassy bead of the planet.
By night, it's very obviously inhabited. But by day, it looks like it's a new world. No one's been there before, even from just 250 miles away. And I think there's something quite consoling, quite moving about that fact. But then when you sort of learn to look at it a little bit more by day, you start to see how, as I'm saying the book, what the political choices we make and the way that we live on the planet and the things that we vote for and the things that we buy and the things that we do.
are sculpting the surface of the Earth. And that seemed to me really interesting that our impact on the planet much as we like to think, oh, we can just kind of go out into space and we look down and it's as if we were never there, but it really isn't. Our impact on it is manifest everywhere in our view of it.
Another sort of political adjacent theme that seemed to dramatise to me was, I suppose, a question of withdrawal versus engagement. And removed from the world, their constantly thoughts going round and round of things that they can't control going on there and things they can control here and loneliness and yet the kind of collective.
friendship they find between themselves and yet they know that it's only temporary and that felt again a very delicately balanced thing that kind of runs throughout. But there is quite an optimistic ending, I thought, in the sense that you do have this moment of solidarity between them. So you're saying that if you were to write it now, it might have been less optimistic.
I wouldn't write this book differently, I don't think, but I've really write a different book. I feel more strident about these things now a bit more urgent about them, but at the time I really wanted to commit to this visual idea, this sort of painterly idea of what I was trying to portray, to not be on a soapbox.
I don't think that's something novels can do very well. But I was very interested in the scales of which the typhoon tries to articulate from above. It is this rather beautiful shape, sort of shapely thing that's moving on across the surface of the planet.
the way you can see it being pulled along the equator and then circulating around by the Earth's rotation and it's sort of majestic and it's wonderful and on the surface of the Earth it's terrible. Not just a weather event but in injustice because people who were disproportionately affected by extreme weather are the people who are probably causing it the least and I just wanted to use a visual cue I guess to flag up.
bigger issue. It's not a key theme in the book, but there are notes that you strike about how space travel has been politicised in the past and associated with a kind of quite strident and self-confident and quite masculine, you say, projection of the might of mankind and so on. And I think that's only become more the case in the present with the commercialisation of space travel is associated with these oligarchic political figures. That feels almost prescient that you kind of wrote that in. Is that on your mind when you're writing those pits?
It was so I have in the book we're transiting the earth over one day and on the space station but then in the background of the book there's a lunar mission happening which is based on the Artemis mission which will be happening sending men and women back to the moon after 50 years of not going there.
I put that in there because I partly wanted to ground the book in time so it's somewhere in this decade, slightly in the future I suppose, but also because I wanted to kind of create a counterbalance. So you've got this transit of the space station around the earth and that's been happening for 25 years and it's been collaborative, it's been earth-centric and it's been a kind of peace project I suppose.
And then you've got this new age of space exploration which is beginning now and the ISS will be de-orbited in the next few years. And obviously the whole kind of Russian Western project has failed. I kind of want to just almost memorialise those last few years of what has been an era of peaceful cooperation between nations that has been symbolised by this incredible spacecraft.
The fact that we're going into a future which is far more individualistic, is far more corporate. It's going to be exploitative and problematic in all sorts of ways and away from the Earth. This is if we're no longer going to be attentive to this planet, but just trying to get away from it and trying to exploit the moon and Mars for its resources and for private gain, not for the good of humanity as much as Elon Musk might tell us it is.
After the break, Samantha Harvey tells Nick Harris about the influences on her writing and the author she aspires to get close to. You can read Nick's write-up of this interview and all of our book reviews on the New Statesman website. We're running a special offer in the run-up to Christmas. You can give a loved one a year's New Statesman subscription for as little as £49. Visit newstatesman.com forward slash pod 24. We're back after this.
I'd love to talk about the writing of the novel, because I think it's one of the most beautiful, lyrical, brilliant experiences from a contemporary novel I've had for a long time. And you can hear a lot of joys in there, a lot of wolves. She has a little maim check in your capsule history of humanity. She's got the presiding spirit of the writing about it. I know she's a great influence of yours in general.
I don't think she was. I didn't really have any particular writer in mind, and I suppose you think, well, I would say that. I mean, I love the idea of influence, and I'm constantly influenced by books, by writers. My sense of influence is most consciously one of
setting a bar for myself and saying, okay, this may not be as good as whoever the waves. I may not be able to do that, but is it as close to that as I can make it? Is this the best I can do is holding these other writers in my mind and trying to pull myself up towards their level and
And so influence is a very important thing for me. I think once, and I guess this is true for most writers, once you get going and you find your theme and your subject and your voice, you are just doing it on your own terms. And people have commented on the fact that this is kind of like the waves, you've got the six voices. But it was never really based on that. There were so many unconscious influences, but
It was very much just its own thing and what I wanted to try and find prose that could be kind of precise in particular but have an energy to it because there is as many people have rightly pointed out no plot in the book. So I was trying to find other ways of making it propulsive in different tempos using time in different ways.
Compressing and stretching time, using different registers in the language and zooming out, trying to create kinetic energy in the book without using plot.
No, I think that's absolutely the case. The Earth takes on the role of a character in the subject, like you said, like a painting. And I can kind of hear your voice as a character in itself. And you're willing to have almost essayistic digression, sometimes with the voice of the characters, sometimes from above. I know you described it as a space pastel or something like that. Like a nature writing experiment. But there's a philosophical element there too. And that's coming from you, isn't it? Those questions being posed and answered throughout.
Of course, yeah, and I think I probably do show my hand in the book quite a lot and none of this, I think this is ridiculous, but none of this is particularly conscious. I just would go with it with this novel more than any of my others and I think that's partly because the book that I wrote prior to this book was nonfiction and was about my experience of insomnia and I
wrote that 100% by instinct. I mean, I didn't think it was going to be a book. I had no idea what I was writing and I just wrote whatever came and let it take whatever form it wanted to take. And although that was a very different project,
There was something about writing that was so much instinct. I mean, I always try to write from my heart always, but trying to also write from something that's very instinctive and sort of extemporizing and that just you just follow whatever it is you think a particular passage needs and go with it and don't argue with it.
I thought, I just want to try and see if I can do that in a novel, see if I can use that instinct. Obviously, I'm going to have to control it more, but can I just follow my nose with it? So that was the poem with this, and then it ended up with what I think is quite an unconventional novel, and I've been frankly amazed by its success, if I can speak frankly. Because I think it's not a very obvious novel, and it's no one thing.
But it's found its readership, I mean, already. I mean, it's the best selling, I think, so far, of the shortest. And obviously, that will only grow from here on. The only other influence that came immediately to mind, partially because, again, you've cited it somewhere, was there's the passage where the astronauts are talking about the Challenger disaster. And in Ben Lano's 1004, there's a similar bit where he's talking about watching the challenge disaster when he was young and how that made him become a poet and so on.
Yes, and I read Tenno for about a year ago, and I had finished orbital by then, and I read it, and I was, you know, you have those moments of like, and it was, I had a similar thing with In Ascension by Martin McInnes, and in that book, there was a passage about the Voyager probes, and it was so uncannily similar to the passage in orbital, and I had that similar thing with Ben Lerner as well, this
Oh, mirroring, almost. But it wasn't an influence, although I love Ben Lenna's writing. You know, he's one of the sort of contemporary writers that I just feel is of what, doing something that nobody else is doing. And when I read him, I feel like he's six miles ahead of me all the time. I can't keep up with his mind. It's extraordinary.
In recent years, I think, not to generalise yours, but the booker has probably plump for these. Slightly bigger canvas, famisargas, social novels, whereas your style of writing is somewhat poetic and you have sort of the seats and they kind of run throughout and there's a slider. I think James would call it a slight but enormous. You must be delighted that style of writing is going to get this boost from the price.
Yeah. I mean, nobody is more surprised than I am to have won this prize. And I did think myself, the shortlist, is a destination in itself. And I was very happy to get there. And I would have been happy if the journey had ended there. And I didn't have any sense of winning because of exactly what you say. I mean, apart from the fact that all the other shortlisted books were more than worthy winners.
I think the book often does go to these kind of bigger, vermutea, more story-led, narrative-led books. And it's really interesting to me that has not happened this year and that it seems to me a different kind of book to the one that normally wins. I feel completely confounded by it at the moment and haven't processed it at all. Well, congratulations again. Thank you very much for talking to us. Thank you.
You've been listening to Culture from The New Statesman, with me Tom Gatti, my colleague Nick Harris and our guest, Samantha Harvey. Kate Lambeau will be here on Wednesday with Insight and Andrew Maher, Hannah Barnes and the Politics team will be back on Thursday with all the latest from Westminster. Hit follow in your podcast app to make sure you get every episode as soon as it is published. This episode was produced by Chris Stone.
