By Samantha Harvey
- Pub Date: 2023
- Genre: Space, Science fiction, Literary fiction
- Where I bought this book: Oblong Books, Millerton, N.Y.
- Why I bought this book: It's the 2024 Booker Prize winner
- Bookmark used: Top 10 Most Challenged Books, from Roebling.com
Samantha Harvey's love letter* to planet Earth reverberates with rapid-fire brilliance on every page.
But it's much more than that. It's a paean to the solar system, its exploration, and our humanity.
It's there in the description of the astronauts and cosmonauts watching in wonder at seeing the aurora australis** from above.
It's there as they travel down east from the North Pole, past the Alaskan and Canadian coastlines, over the Pacific and South America, before swinging across the South Atlantic to Africa and up to the Middle East before watching the "first crack of silver" marking their fifth or sixth sunrise of the day.
It's there as they watch, helplessly, as a typhoon bores down on and eventually assaults the Philippines.
It's there as author Harvey shows the blackness of the deep oceans and the color palettes of the land: The field of gold of Polynesia, the blues of the Indian Ocean, the purple-green of the Nile River.
It's in Uzbekistan, an expanse of ochre and brown. It's in the apricot desert of Takla Makan,*** It's in the rose-flushed and snow-covered mountains of Asia. It's there as Astronaut Nell looks down during her spacewalk: Cuba pink with morning, the turquoise shallows of the Caribbean; her left foot obscuring France, her right foot Germany.
More than a mere novel, the 2024 Booker Prize-winner reads like a dazzling think piece in the best literary journal, At 200 pages, it ends too soon. But as you set it aside, you agree with some of her final words about life on a minor planet revolving around an ordinary star in an obscure part of the Milky Way: "The past comes, the future, the past. It's always now, it's never now."
Its plot is simple: A single day, 18 revolutions around the Earth in the lives of four astronauts, Nell, Chie, Shaun, and Pietro from America, Europe and Japan, and two cosmonauts, Anton and Roman, from Russia, as they live, work, and play in the International Space Station. In small snippets, we learn about their lives at home, growing up. Learn about their families. Learn about their travels on earth. Learn why they wanted to go to space.
They reflect on life in the cramped quarters, the state of the planet, and their place in the universe. They note how from 250 miles above, the Earth is "just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war." They see no borders except for the land and the sea. Countries are indistinguishable.
Except when the sun is on the other side, they see the lights of their hometowns below: Seattle, Osaka, London, Bologna, St. Petersburg, Moscow.
And politics below sometimes intrudes on the international mission of peace above. Because of "engaging political disputes" on Earth, they must use their "national toilet" in the Soviet-built module or the American one. Americans, Japanese and Europeans on one side, Russians on the other.
They follow the rule but find it amusing. "I'm going to take a national pee, Shaun will say. Or Roman: I'm going to go and do one for Russia."
In 1969, while piloting Apollo 11 alone, Michael Collins snapped a photo of the lunar module taking off from the moon, with the Earth hanging in the background. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were in the Eagle, and the rest of humanity was on Earth.
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| NASA photo |
Michael Collins is the only human being not in that photo, it is said. ...(But) what of all the people on the other side of earth that the camera can't see, and everybody in the southern hemisphere which is in the night sky and gulped by the darkness of space? ... In truth, nobody is in that photograph, nobody can be seen. Everybody is invisible. ... The strongest, most deductible proof of life in that photo is the photographer himself. ... In that sense, the most enchanting thing about Collins's image is that, at the moment of taking the photograph, he is really the only human presence it contains.
Sublime. It's thoughtful, soulful, and mindful. It shows the earth being "wired and wakeful." You want to read it slowly, mark every other paragraph, then read it again. Read it with a cup of tea on the table and cat in your lap, poking at your skin, the pinpricks making you feel alive, if Earthbound.
It is truly a book for the ages.
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