In Orbital, mortality gives life its shape.' Discuss.

Published during the confinement of pandemic lockdowns and awarded the 2024 Booker Prize, Samantha Harvey's 2023 novel Orbital traces sixteen circuits of an Earth scarred by the Anthropocene, interrogating how the consciousness of death frames mortal existence.¹ While the overwhelming magnitude of the cosmos initially appears to diminish human transience into insignificance, the novel instead reveals that mortality shapes life by forging the shared frailties that sustain it.² Harvey therefore invites her contemporary audience to embrace the impermanence of existence, urging readers to locate enduring value within the fleeting bounds of human life.³

Harvey initially presents the orbital perspective as an isolating confrontation with human frailty, yet reveals that mourning and collective witness transform such vulnerability into a vital shared endurance.⁴ Centring on the weight of bereavement, the author captures the introspective burden of private mourning through Chie's anguished chant of "mother mother mother mother"⁵, extending this grief to her readership to reveal human finitude as an inescapable weight. This isolated suffering widens when Pietro's fixation on the "particular fisherman and his family" confronts the storm's "building magnificence", framing the typhoon as a microcosm of shared frailty. This securely guarded kinship becomes its own sanctuary, the oxymoronic enchantment of an "unearthly watery light" magnifying the "tethers of biological life" within "the chapel['s]" sanctified shelter, demonstrating that mortality binds humanity together long after the "piddling speck" of our fleeting span concludes. Chie's quiet bereavement finds its counterpart in the crew's collective vigilance, as Shaun's vigilant gaze widens this earthly vulnerability into a planetary condition.⁶ Suspended between the cosmos and Earth with the collective consciousness "they are so together"⁷ yet "so alone", the astronauts coalesce into a unified psychological entity, the isolating sublimity of the void forging an interdependence that fortifies them against their own transience. That unity nevertheless falters when the fragmented "trail of gunpowder", its "milky cover" obscuring the "siphoning eye", strips the crew of certainty, their vision fading into the crushing scale of space's boundless expanse. In defiance of this overwhelming smallness, contemporary readers bear witness to Shaun's "postcard of Las Meninas", its bystanders mirroring the crew's "privileged anxious view" of "mother Earth" as they assert their brief presence. The quiet contemplation of this vulnerable planet accentuates the duality of beauty and burden, allowing her readership alongside the six to experience Earth's Anthropocene transformation as a reminder that life gains its shape through its very fragility. Through this braiding of individual mourning and collective witness, Harvey confirms that mortality defines and deepens human bonds. Harvey initially presents the orbital perspective as an isolating confrontation with human frailty, yet reveals that mourning and collective witness transform such vulnerability into a vital shared endurance.⁸