Audiobook Review

For such a short book I’ve been trying to read it for a long time.

Orbital
Samantha Harvey

Six astronauts rotate in their spacecraft contemplating the world below.

A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?

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Every now and again, I like to dip my toe into a genre that I might not read that often, and since Orbital was short, had won the Booker prize, and was set in space, I thought it was worth having a listen. Although if I’m being honest, I wouldn’t recommend listening to this book; I found it extremely hard to concentrate on it.

That comment is not a reflection on the narration. I thought Sarah Naudi did a fantastic job, but I find it difficult to keep my focus on an audiobook when it’s full of so much inconsequential description. Don’t get me wrong, this author has crafted some beautiful and thought-provoking sentences, but I continually found my mind drifting, so a lot of the words were also very forgettable. I think there needed to be a little more involvement of the characters for me to be a little more invested.

I can actually only remember three of the astronauts’ names, and only one really stood out to me, Chie, whose stories of her home and her mother were about some of the most memorable parts of the book. Even though she is the one that I felt I got more insight on than the rest of them, I still don’t feel as if she was a well-rounded person. The people were seemingly not important enough to really flesh out; I didn’t feel like their observations were anything more than basic.

There is a chance that I would have been able to take in more of this book had I read a physical copy, but I’m not convinced that it would have made the story less mundane. I have read books before that have been light on plot and have been successful, but I don’t feel like Orbital pulls it off.