By Dylan Kwok

Orbital
Samantha Harvey
Vintage (2023) / 160 pages / SGD 23.95

Time is a strange thing. We live in its stream, feel its ebb and flow and count it fastidiously with timepieces and calendars, but how many of us can really measure its passing without relying on watches or clocks, the position of the sun or the colour of the sky? Not many, probably, and when you subtract the unseen factors on Earth that aid our fragile chronoception, that small pool of people shrinks even further.

Samantha Harvey's latest novel reflects this truth when her characters – the crew of the ISS – undergo tests to see if they can still accurately perceive minutes and seconds. Having the added disorientation of being in space, where they see 16 sunrises and sunsets a day, they do terribly, and Harvey mocks them gently for failing. But as you read this sprawling yet compact novel, you get the feeling that Harvey isn't just distorting her characters' sense of time, but the reader's, because as the narrative weaves back and forth, darting from past to future to present and from sunrise to sunrise to sunrise, it's easy to forget the main story takes place in a single 24-hour span, and so when Harvey finally reiterates this, it comes as a jolt – she has made you the astronaut who's failed the time perception test.

This storytelling trick is one of the flourishes Harvey displays as she narrates a day in the life of the ISS crew which at first glance doesn't seem like a narrative, yet it is in its own way. Despite the cosmic setting, nothing blockbuster-worthy happens – no Gravity, The Martian or even Apollo 13 – but that's intentional, because as Harvey puts it: "If you're an astronaut you'd rather not ever be news." Instead, the story, as literary fiction often does, strings together personal histories of each character, meditations on humanity and cosmology, and events outside their control, like a typhoon they watch hitting the Philippines over the course of the day. It's an uphill task to write such fiction without coming off as unfocused, and indeed Harvey's lyrical prose looks exactly the kind you'd expect from an overly indulgent author, but surprisingly in her hands it feels sharp. It's no page-turner (not that it's trying to be), but each anecdote, musing or observation has the effect of pushing you one page forward until suddenly you're at the end of the novel.

That's not to say it's a breezy read, however, and there are sections where the plot eddies rather than flows. Harvey's conceit is that being confined together in the ISS causes the crew's thoughts, dreams, histories and personas to mix and meld, and to that end her narration flows from one character's viewpoint to another with little indication of the change, and her dialogue is largely embedded within long paragraphs, without the helpful aid of inverted commas. It's clever, no doubt, and accentuates her metaphor, but the task of having to double back to previous pages to check who is talking does take some wind out of the forward motion of the story. It's no dealbreaker, but it is a surprising problem for a story with really only six central characters.

To a great many of us – unless you happen to be an astronaut or a billionaire with 50 million in pocket change – space remains largely mysterious. We can see pictures, of course, and read descriptions by cosmonauts and astronauts and even view live footage of life on the ISS – many hours of which Harvey watched while writing her novel – but such vignettes only capture so much, which in reality, of course, is so little. Harvey notes this herself through the frustrations of one of her characters, and she writes: "She finds she often struggles for things to tell people at home, because the small things are too mundane and the rest is too astounding and there seems to be nothing in between." Outside of asking a collective crew of the ISS, there's no way to confirm whether Orbital really captures that "nothing in between", that secret inner life of these scientists in the sky we've so often mythologised, and their collective experience of shared life above Earth. All we can do is trust the tales we've been told. But with Harvey's novel, you don't need extra convincing.

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