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I regularly read Sojourners, found online at "sojo.net." The May 2024 edition of the magazine had a book review of Orbital, by Samantha Harvey. The cover of Harvey's book is pictured above. The Sojourners' review can be found online at this link (but maybe only for subscribers). I have included the entire review below.

I want to highlight a specific quote from the review, which is actually a quote from the book, as well. What Harvey is saying is exactly what I have said, more than once, in my daily blog postings. To the degree that we can all begin to see the Earth this way, we have a chance!

Here's the quote that I want you to think about:

In orbit, the astronauts find themselves incapable of thinking anything other than “old thoughts born into new moments.” They notice new topographical details as the novel progresses, sure, and they learn more about each other. But they find themselves returning again and again to the same old idea. The astronauts realize “without that earth we are all finished. We couldn’t survive a second without its grace, we are sailors on a ship on a deep, dark unswimmable sea” (emphasis added).

oooOOOooo

‘ORBITAL’ OFFERS A GOD’S-EYE VIEW OF OUR FRAGILE HOME

Samantha Harvey’s new novel asks us to appreciate the paradox of our mighty and vulnerable planet.

BY EZRA CRAKER

IN ONE OF her visions, the 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich saw all of creation in the palm of her hand. She observed that it was round as a ball and small as a hazelnut. “I marvelled how it might last,” she wrote, “for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little[ness].” In other words, she thought it might vanish for being so small.

This is the feeling that pervades Samantha Harvey’s lyrical novel Orbital, which follows six astronauts as they circle the Earth and conduct scientific research. Hailing from various countries, they experience together a God’s-eye view of the planet they left behind. Continents roll past, political borders disappear, and a sense of urgency emerges. In a way only astronauts can, they absorb the simultaneous vitality and fragility of their collective home and reckon with the human-caused calamities that threaten it.

Light on plot, the book nevertheless has an unsettling narrative heartbeat: An abnormally powerful typhoon, exacerbated by climate change, is forming off the coast of the Philippines, and one of the team’s tasks is to monitor its development. Theirs is a “privileged anxious view.” They know all too well — and are powerless to stop — the devastation that will come for those below.

But once their brief window for data collection passes, the spacecraft continues its path, steady and unbothered. They bear witness to the next part of the world, and the next. Harvey’s descriptions of the revolving planet, through the stunned eyes of her characters, are a testament to the power of language to rekindle one’s sense of awe. Africa is a “paint-splattered, ink-leached, crumpled-satin, crumbled-pastel” continent. The American Southwest is a “wide dry cowhide.” Looking at the “buffed and brushed and burnished” ocean, one astronaut recalls Psalm 104:3, “God lays the beams of his upper chambers on the waters.”

Wonder and doom, wonder and doom. Orbital is preoccupied with many things — hubris, progress, grief — but at the book’s core is a paradox about Earth, our mighty and vulnerable home: It’s both a “towering parent” and “a planet held hostage by humans, a gun to its vitals.” It’s “a thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness” and a “piddling speck at the centre of nothing.” It’s life as we know it and closer to death than we’re ready to admit.

In orbit, the astronauts find themselves incapable of thinking anything other than “old thoughts born into new moments.” They notice new topographical details as the novel progresses, sure, and they learn more about each other. But they find themselves returning again and again to the same old idea. The astronauts realize “without that earth we are all finished. We couldn’t survive a second without its grace, we are sailors on a ship on a deep, dark unswimmable sea.”

In her vision, after Julian wondered about the smallness of creation, she came to an understanding: “It lasteth, and ever shall [last] for that God loveth it.” It would take considerable audacity to believe a planet as delicate as ours is built to last — and a considerably audacious faith to live as if that’s true. But, as Orbital demonstrates in its reverent and glittering pages, if there ever was a time to have old thoughts born into new moments, it’s now.