“The Milky Way is a smoking trail of gunpowder shot through a satin sky.”
Who writes like this? Who sees like this? I floated through Orbital, the wondrous Booker Prize winner from Samatha Harvey. A little sore from claustrophobia and an achy heart, I was stunned by the power of language. Again. Harvey’s reader can look down from a tin bucket orbiting a speeding planet; peer out of windows bolted into metal walls separating humans from a cold, noiseless void; observe 16 days and 16 nights in a single 24-hour period; and cry, most likely. The transportation by a book…do we need to say it again? How reading transforms a bus schedule into a warm arrival just as well as it outlines the shape of our sorrow. Harvey softens our loneliness by imagining a discovery occurring a millennia after we’re gone:
“In forty thousand years or so, when the two probes sail close enough to a planetary system, maybe just maybe one of these planets will be home to some life form which will spy the probe… stay its telescope, retrieve the derelict fuel-less old probe… lower the stylus (supplied) to the record… and set free the dadadadaa of Beethoven’s Fifth. It’ll roll like thunder through a different frontier. Human music will permeate the Milky Way’s outer reaches. There’ll be Chuck Berry and Bach, there’ll be Stravinsky and Blind Willie Johnson, and the didgeridoo, violin, slide guitar and shakuhachi. Whale song will drift through the constellation of Ursa Minor. Perhaps a being on a planet of the star AC +793888 will hear the 1970s recording of sheep bleat, laughter, footsteps, and the soft pluck of a kiss. Perhaps they’ll hear the trundle of a tractor and the voice of a child.” (Orbital, Samatha Harvey, 2024)
Orbital spins around our mother, sweeping over dusty mountains ranges, a gathering typhoon, massive cities that can only be seen by their glow at night, blind to our scrawny lives below. Who paints a valley that color, describes a sea the dull grey of a brooch missing a stone?
Who writes like this?
“The earth is the answer to every question. The earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits. The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sights that are difficult to tell.” (Orbital)
Well, there was that Irish fella, with his own day-in-a-life novel, not looking down from the sky above the wobbling earth, but looking up, with the same wonder, to see:
“The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.” (Ulysses, James Joyce, 1914)
*Written by Trish O’Hare, Executive Director of Gemma