Before Tuesday night, the author Samantha Harvey had got used to thinking of herself as a bit of an underdog. “It’s not out of self-pity, but I definitely saw myself as being on the periphery,” she says. All that changed on Tuesday when she beat the critical favourite Percival Everett to win this year’s Booker Prize for her slender, luminous space-born novel Orbital. No longer can the softly spoken 49-year-old, the only British author on this year’s shortlist, regard herself as a writer of critically acclaimed yet criminally neglected novels. “All writers have to pretend they don’t care about not winning prizes. But I keep going to myself: ‘f–k! I’ve won the Booker!’.”
Orbital is a surprisingly uplifting winner. Set over a single 24-hour period aboard the International Space Station, it follows six international astronauts as they circle the Earth 16 times with Puck-like speed. There is no plot to speak of, yet the novel contains multitudes, as cities, rivers and moons collide in a gorgeous, incandescent pile-up of image and metaphor.
Did Harvey have any concerns about entering the minds of six characters, including two Russians, one Japanese, one Italian, one American and one Brit, whose experiences on board are so utterly alien to anything she has ever known herself? “I did, yes. About writing from the point of view of astronauts. About writing from the perspectives of all these different nationalities, and about cultural appropriation. I didn’t have sensitivity readers but I did ask a few friends to read the manuscript early on with these concerns in mind.”
Yet she rejects the idea that she ought not to have attempted to write from these perspectives in the first instance. “I think current literature has got a bit bogged down with the question of authenticity and truth. But I find troubling the idea that I can’t write a book from the perspective of a mouse, that I can’t write one from the perspective of someone who is ethnically different to me, as though that person’s view of the world is so absolutely other, that there is no way of me bridging it.”
By definition, Orbital grapples with what lies beyond human comprehension. Harvey is not a religious person but as a writer she has always been very interested in matters of faith: her previous novel The Western Wind subtly wrapped questions of belief inside a 15th-century murder plot. Does she agree we tend to regard outright religious novels with suspicion? “Yes, I think we see faith and literature as somehow antithetical. I have a good friend who is an American writer and a Christian and I know that she struggles with the whole publishing industry in America which tends to be very liberal and secular in attitude.”