Too much zeitgeist

I usually read two or more books at the same time, generally at least one fiction and one non-fiction. This means I can switch out books according to my mood; if I don't feel like reading something informative, I can go for something fictional instead. Or, more often, if I don't feel like something 'heavy' or 'literary', I can go for something a bit lighter. Added to that, reserving books at the library gives you no influence on when a chosen book will arrive. There are no fines for late returns, but I try to finish a library book in four weeks at the maximum, so other people can enjoy it too.

All of these mechanisms combined in January. I'd started reading Gliff, the new novel by Ali Smith, shortly after receiving it for Christmas. Her books tend to be on the literary side, but are generally light and uplifting (although my heart was in my throat the entire time when reading about the curlew in Companion Piece, but he turned out fine). This newest novel is a lot darker in tone, however, there are no little bright sparks as in the seasonal quartet books. Reading this during the darkest days of the year was quite depressing, and I read lots of non-fiction books on the side.

Then one of my library reservations came through; Mania, by Lionel Shriver. Now I'd only reserved this based on a Storygraph suggestion. Apart from the blurb I hadn't read any reviews or anything else about the book. I enjoyed some of her previous works, although again We need to talk about Kevin kept me on the edge of my seat, but from the blurb this felt like a comic escape. So I thought this book would be a nice distraction from the Gliff universe.

As it turns out, Mania lives in the same dark world as Gliff. They are both set in alternate versions of our times, where destructive politics have gotten the upper hand. In Smith's England, people and words are cancelled by drawing red lines around them, although I haven't read far enough to know why. In Shriver's US, it is no longer appropriate to call someone stupid, dumb, or any derivative. We are all born the same, we are all equally smart, we just process information at different speeds. The main character, with the puzzeling first name of Pearson, does not want to adhere to these rules, especially since she went some length with donors to make sure her children would be highly intelligent. So she rebels against an alternate universe in which Obama is not re-elected because he is too smartist. Exams and entry tests are discontinued and if you're not hired for a job, you can sue because you feel discriminated against. The results are predictable; society falls into disarray. In a not-alternative parallel, Donald Trump is elected because he can in no way be called smart.

Now this could have been a humorous book. It takes a satirical approach on several social movements that culminate in something pretty horrific (apart from the election result). However, the tone of the book is biting. The main character, although her motives are understandeable, is pretty unlikeable. She mistreats and endangers her children and her partner, solely because she cannot control herself. Her best friend, who may or may not turn out to be an enemy, is the voice of reason throughout but for that she is snubbed. And in the end, a deus ex machina appears to make everything alright again, although our main character still protests to much. She is a classic tragic hero, but without any tragic irony.

Added to that, the writing is laboured. We are supposedly reading Pearson's diary, composed during Covid times when most of the US population died from vaccines as pharmaseutical companies are now staffed by dummies who created a poison. But really, nobody writes like this. We get one day out of each year, with loads of exposition to fill in the gaps. These chaters contain never-ending sentences full of strained alliterations. The inside joke throughout the novel is that Pearson herself is not all that bright, so this is possibly alluding to her using posh synonyms, but as she is a teacher of English composition and creative writing at a university, one would expect her to be able to write properly. The bits that read nicely are the dialogues, but no one can remember conversations from a decade ago ad verbatim, so again we cannot trust our narrator.

So both in form and in content, it was a difficult read. The message saddened me, but not as much as how a nice concept, which may well partly turn out to be reality in the not-to-distant-future, was strangled to death by an annoying character, difficult language and unrealistic style. As Shriver is a somewhat controversial activist, I realise that some have simply disregarded her novel because of her political views. In my opinion, not taking into account the author or her possible intent still leaves you with a pretty poor product, plodding powerlessly onward and never nearing a neat narrative nexus (see what I did there?). 

My escape from Gliff turned out to be a jump into the same boat. I finished Mania, but without any joy in reading. However, I still look forward to reading more of Smith's book, since her writing is always beautiful and her characters are more likeable. Not for now, though. For now I buried myself in a Bridgerton novel, another library book, to properly escape the darkness of winter. 

Orbital

Once upon a time I started the year by reading the Booker winner (I still can't get used to leaving the 'Man' out) of the previous year. This was a nice tradition, but it could provide me with a tedious book that stalled my reading speed, so I would still be griding my way through it in the first half of February. So I stopped enforcing the habit on myself, creating quite a backlog of Booker winners still to read. After getting through most of these in 2023, I felt like I could freely enjoy the Booker winners again, if they seemed to my liking.

Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, was the 2024 winner. I probably would have read it by the beautiful cover design and intriguing blurb alone, thinking that at less than 140 pages, I would blast through. I would have been terribly wrong.

Although this is a small and short book, it is dense. We get the whole of humanity, its history, its faults and achievements, its purpose and future, sometimes broken down into personal backstories but generally focussed on how it has impacted the rest of the planet and perhaps the universe, in a small-sized package. Sticking to the theme of the novel; if it were just a little bit denser, it would be a black hole. 

There isn't much of a plot. We spend one day with the six people living aboard the International Space Station, looping around the Earth in 90 minute intervals. Lots of sunrises, lots of sunsets (these apparently never get old, even when you've seen thousands of them up there). Lots of measurements, research, practical stuff like moving garbage bags around or eating honeycomb. But in the sense of what happens; nothing much.

In a somewhat related sideplot, there is also a group of astronauts on a different mission to visit the Moon on that same day. I am not sure why this was included, as to me it just distracted from the six and their lives and musings. But it is the only thing that really happens, apart from a typhoon on Earth just about to hit the Philippines. Both of these things obviously do not physically impact the ISS, they are just in the mind of its inhabitants.

We get to know some of them. I found Chie's story, the Japanese astronaut whose mother survived the atomic bomb and who died the day before the story took place, the best. There were so many different layers to how she experienced life, both her mother's life, her own life but also life in general, how she managed to cope with her grief in this confined space, that for me could have been the whole of the novel. But there are five other people in the ISS with her and we get some glimpses of them; the Russian astronaut who misses his kids, the British astronaut musing on her Irish farm, the American busy with his faith. The fact that I'm referring to these characters by their nationality is because I've blatantly forgotten their names; that is how much impact they made on me. 

And that to me is the second main fault of the book; we do not get to share the six characters' experiences, backstories, feelings etc equally. That to me made it feel a bit lopsided, as if some of the others were token additions but not real people. Which is funny, because the whole novel otherwise felt incredibly real. I read somewhere that astronauts who've been in the ISS were surprised at the level of realistic detail, both on how it looks, on how it is to live there, and on all the practical things. If the setting is so real, why couldn't the characters all be real as well?

Finally, as I said earlier, this novel is not about what happens. It is about taking a step back, reflecting on the human impact on Earth. Which can be durable and sustainable, such as the ISS itself, but also destructive, such as the impact of climate change or the human encroachment on natural habitats. Zooming out to this macro level, also somewhat zooming out to see all of human history, puts a lot of the emotions that the characters feel into perspective. But you need both. And you need the realisation that in the end, we are still at the mercy of other powers, as the typhoon is a constant reminder of. I found these relfections, several of which take place as the astronauts sleep, the most inspiring and thought-provoking parts of the book.

All in all, Orbital was a beautiful read that could have been better if it had better balance and/or focus. But its message, about our progress and our pitfalls, makes it a clear Booker winner.