The court of Louis XVI in space

Space isn't cosy

Hello again, 

And welcome back to the most chaotic substack, where one week it is second hand shopping, and the next space. 

I went to a book shop recently, I bought Orbital by Samantha Harvey. I don’t buy new books that often because I get them free via work, unless they’re books I think are probably really good and not getting enough publicity, then I feel I kind of have a duty to buy them. 

I saw this one because it was on the Booker list so it’s not the kind of book I’d tend to buy, but it is set in space, among a crew of astronauts, and I love space and thought this was a great premise so I bought it. I have loved thinking about space for as long as I can remember, and some evidence would suggest even before that. The first word I spoke was apparently moon, which I would say as I pointed up at the night sky.

This is not unique to me, objectively space is one of the most amazing (in the literal sense) concepts, entities, however you wish to conceive of it, there is. Children in general love learning about space, stars and planets, I think because there is such an innate sense of otherness to these things. I think the expansiveness of space too, which is (again literally) impossible for us to imagine, does something interesting to our brains, it lets them run loose a little bit. 

Anyway, in the book shop the man serving me chuckled and told me he imagined I was buying Orbital because it is the shortest book on the Booker list. (The inner lives we invent for the people we meet can be so much smaller and blander than the one we experience for ourselves. There is a lesson there.) 

I had such high hopes, and probably too high. But I was very disappointed to find that Orbital really wasn’t for me. To me it felt very over written in that way novels by poets can be (usual caveats about not all poets and Harvey is actually not a poet and so on and so forth) but it just has that poet novelist thing where you can sense the heady presence of a thesaurus sitting over the proceedings. 

This is just my taste I am talking about here and I know lots of people would disagree. I read a few reviews of Orbital and they were all very positive so I’m sure it is a book for lots of people. I do believe a tenet of good criticism is that you have to learn to write in a way that makes it clear which things you are saying are a matter of your taste or opinion and which you think are objective statements. “I didn’t like the writing” is generally a better, more useful to the reader, and more accurate statement than “the writing is bad”, except in the cases where the writing actually is irrefutably bad.  

But this writing was not for me at all. Here are some examples: 

“Up here in microgravity you’re a seabird on a warm day drifting, just drifting. What use are biceps, calves, strong shin bones; what use muscle mass? Legs are a thing of the past.”

“From the space station’s distance mankind is a creature that comes out only at night… By day, it’s gone. It hides in plain sight.”

Space is “An animal that could have devoured you yet chose instead to let you into the flank quivering pulse of its exotic wildness.”

I read a sentence like this and my brain starts picking words out automatically. Why do we need exotic if we have wildness already? Can a pulse be anything other than quivering? 

You often see books like this, written with what I would regard as an excess of frivolity in language, described as “beautifully written”. I wonder what beautiful is used to mean here. Writing like this is definitely ornate. But to me beauty is characterised by uniqueness, rather than decoration. And, while writing like this is decorative, I don’t think you can argue that it is experimental or innovative. To me it all feels very “court of Louis XVI”, if that makes any sense. Well even if it doesn’t, “court of Louis XVI” still feels like the best description I can come up with for this. Whenever I read a few lines of it I start to picture white powder and lavender and drawn on beauty spots and ruffs and tiny little lacquered mahogany tables covered in carved drawings of feasts and horses. I guess to me it feels opulent to the point of being ludicrous. 

(I know the opposite of this is that extremely plain third person, or first person with no internality, which you see a lot of right now, where the only tiny bits of description seem deliberately cliched and every sentence is sort of freakishly barren and forgettable and organised around the principle of functionality: “I first met George on a chilly day in September. We were working in a book shop. Every day at lunch we would go to a sandwich shop and pretend to look at the menu but still order the same thing.” 

I definitely don't think this is better. I absolutely hate this stuff to be honest. I get that the idea is “not a wasted word”, “don’t let the writing get in the way of the story” and “readers will find a sentence longer than 6 words complicated to parse so use these sparingly” but I find it so bald and boring and to me there seems to be no skill involved. Strangely you will also see this described as beautiful. And I think that’s a case of the word beautiful being used as if it has a completely different meaning to the one it has in the dictionary. I would just call it extremely plain. The best thing I could say about this is that it’s easy to read. But anyway, I don’t like one extreme of this, and I also don’t like the other extreme.)

Back to Louis XVI. I feel whether or not you like writing like this, you might agree with me here, this kind of extremely decorative writing strikes me as not very “space”. Space, we all know, is almost entirely a non decorative entity, in terms of the frame of reference we are used to here on earth. What does it look like to us? Blackness and occasional whiteness. Even an entire galaxy looks like a white swirl with some flashes of colour. 

Space is empty, brutal, cold, devastating, terrifying, beautiful. So much bigger than the frame of reference we have here on earth, so much emptier. Like nothing else. And the question of how to represent this in an interesting way in language for the duration of a novel (even a short one) is a problem which I accept there is no easy solution to. But I did not feel like this was a problem Harvey had thought about much at all. Here I just felt like I was getting the court of Louis XVI plonked in space, randomly. 

Writing like this always feels very cosy to me too. It makes me think of fat cushions and footstools. And, again, space is not cosy. And cosiness in general is an ethos which runs through this book in a way which made the characters feel improbable to me. The astronauts all think very similar thoughts, mostly about earth, about the meaningless of borders and us all being one big family and so on. “Where do boundaries sit? Sean thinks as he moves past the window.” Even if you agree with this line of thinking, it has the effect of making the book feel like it is, obliquely, more about Brexit or Trump than space. And I didn’t want to read about Brexit, I wanted to read about space.  

When I read a few reviews of Orbital they praised the book for its existential reflections. But, unless I’m missing something, this stuff is just standard left wing politics. Even if it's not your politics, surely you’ve encountered these ideas before?

It is striking how little interest, given they have made the choice to go and live in space for a year or whatever, any of the astronauts has in thinking about space conceptually. For example, time (on the universal scale) is hard to conceptualise for a person who can only think in three dimensions. 

On earth we are used to operating in one time frame: our present. We can see things that have happened in our past, stars, but we don’t think very much about them because our present is much closer to us. 

If you are living in space, much more enmeshed within this landscape of events which have happened at vastly different times, surely time would feel more prescient as a concept. Surely the idea of time as it applies to the universe would cross your mind? Time comes up once in Orbital, just to say in training you’ve been told not to think too much about the fact your day doesn’t start with a sunrise and to still count it as a proper day: “They feel space trying to rid them of the notion of a day”. Is this all that astronauts would think?

With a book like this, the author would never be accused of just writing about their life, because the characters are doing something different to what the author has done. But this felt like a major failure of imagination to me. Similarly, in the world of Orbital, a mathematician never thinks about maths or thinks in equations, but we do all think about whatever we do for work, even when we aren’t working.

There was something else too. None of the astronauts has any wicked, selfish thoughts. None of the normal thoughts any ordinary person has. And in this very surreal, far from normal  environment none of them goes, privately, slightly mad. None of them thinks: humanity seems so totally pointless. Even once. 

They are all humble, thoughtful sweeties. But why does someone want to go to space in the first place? Lots of reasons I am sure, but I find it hard to believe that a big ego would play no part in this. There was no ego here at all. Denying this feels like when writers pretend they write purely because of some extraordinary humanitarian bent they have, because they want to save the world. Everyone who wants to write has a big ego. Having a big ego doesn’t inherently mean you treat other people badly or you care more about your career than art or anything like that. And I know it’s not just ego. Most of the time there are lots of other reasons too. But I don’t think there are any exceptions to this. 

Wanting for something more interesting on space I rewatched Sunshine, the Danny Boyle film, recently. One of my favourite films. I think Danny Boyle is a genius. I love that in his conceptual films, 28 days later too (another of my favourite films), he doesn’t spend any time explaining the concept at all and just starts in the middle. He really trusts the audience. 

Well the conceit here is much wilder and more far fetched than Orbital. Here we have a group of astronauts charged with restarting the sun and saving planet earth. The astronauts in Sunshine have to fly up to the sun and fire a payload into it. Totally improbable in every way. Still it felt much more attuned to how real life humans interact with space than Orbital, and to how real humans behave, too. 

There is no cosiness within the language of this film. I accept that space is easier to represent visually than in language. But the film of Orbital would be entirely dreamy, nostalgic shots of planet earth, here it is basically all the blackness of space. How orange the sun looks. How black areas of the sun look. And within the ship too, instead of cosiness we get claustrophobic grittiness. 

I don’t want to give spoilers but Sunshine explores the idea that space prompts reflections on the nature of our existence and divinity to the extent that it sends certain characters totally round the bend. I was reading some reviews and interviews after and I found this quote from Danny Boyle (relating to how divinity is a theme in the film).

‘Brian Cox admits that you can’t really speak about these things without allowing for what some people would call a “spiritual dimension”,’ says Boyle. ‘The question is, of course, whether that spiritual dimension is just a constraint of the language - the fact that we simply have no other vocabulary to describe such things. I think that’s what Alex believes. But for me, what Capa sees at the end of the movie is definitely something beyond the rational.’

I think this was the kind of reflection that I wanted to underpin Orbital and I didn’t see it in there at all. And if it is there, I mean, if Harvey is posing an answer to even part of this, say, the question of “can we adapt language to describe how space makes us feel” as “we load every sentence up with masses of decoration like a big jolly Christmas tree” I think this is the wrong answer. 

The astronauts in Sunshine can be petty, spiteful and surprising. There is a character played by Channing Tatum, the kind of character Channing Tatum tends to play. A military vibes guy who is weirdly aggressive about the rules being rigidly enforced. At first you are like “I hate that guy” but as the film wears on you see he is really good at making quick decisions based on logic rather than emotion. He is also un precious about his own best interests, always thinking of the bigger mission. That got me thinking: You do kind of need people like that around in extreme situations. And then I spent a while after the film thinking about that kind of personality, I think it is actually extremely rare. And then I thought about the kind of personalities which would make a good crew for a spaceship. 

And yes, ok, this was a much more extreme conceit than Orbital’s. But none of the astronauts on Orbital had a personality which made me think much about anything. In fact, I couldn’t really get a sense of any of their personalities at all. You get backstory, they all think about their families and marriages and so on, but not much personality. (Interestingly you get basically no backstory in Sunshine, I still feel you come away with a much stronger sense of who these characters are as people).

So, yes, a grumpy post from someone who wanted to read a book about how mend-binding and bleak and beautiful space is and felt like they were tricked into reading about a holly jolly version of earth instead. And an earth missing much texture about the thing which makes me feel invested in planet earth in the first place, the people. Which is perhaps the book Orbital is intended to be. I just badly wanted to read a very different one. 

Till next time xxxx