What Art Can Do
Orbital by Samatha Harvey
They will each be here for nine months or so, nine months of this weightless drifting, nine months of this swollen head, nine months of this sardine living, nine months of this earthward gaping, then back to the patient planet below.
Orbital, by Samantha Harvey
Obital, shortlisted for The Booker Prize, is a novel about one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Profound questions are addressed: what is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity? In an interview with the substack Auraist, Samantha Harvey spoke about her prose.
“I knew roughly what I wanted the prose to feel and sound like if it were a piece of music – it would be gentle and pastoral. It would be open and fairly melodic but its notes might not always go where you’d expect them to. It would have breathless flurries. Its gentleness would have to be spiked with longing, a sound that speaks to nostalgia more than anticipation. It must somehow reach toward awe. All of that.”
Oh, yes. Absolutely. I hear the music playing in this novel, and it’s what I need right now to remind me that not everything in the world is the sound of walls being torn down.
Harvey opens with the base clause, “They will each be here for nine months or so.” The pronoun “they” conveys the collective and “each” delineates the individual. In this sentence is the roadmap for the novel, which dips in and out of both.
Harvey embeds the two words in the base clause that will repeat like musical notes throughout, “nine months.” I love repetition because it heightens the emotion (I hear hints of exasperation), because it draws the reader’s attention to the repeated word(s), signaling their importance to the characters. The repetition also creates a profound, unmistakeable rhythm.
The base clause ends with “nine months” and the next phrase repeats it. The name of this style technique is anadiplosis, the repetition of a word(s) in the preceding clause or phrase or sentence (in Greek, a doubling, folding up). That is has an actual name feels like an explicit permission to use it. It’s sanctioned; it’s approved, go ahead, use it.
What follows is anaphora, the repetition of word(s) at the beginning of phrases, clauses or sentences. “Nine months” is repeated four times and with each iteration comes a new vivid sensory detail about the characters’ existence in space. The repetition lengthens the sentence, creating a feeling like we’re orbiting around the earth, and now we’re in the realm of syntactic symbolism, when the architecture of the sentence simulates the content. These four phrasess are parallel, meaning they are similarly structured: a subject followed by a prepositional phrase. Parallelism coupled with the anaphora creates elegant music:
1. nine months of this weightless drifting
2. nine months of this swollen head
3. nine months of this sardine living
4. nine months of this earthward gaping
The ending of the sentence provides a sense of closure and echoes the opening. It’s a second base clause, though it’s camouflaged because of ellipsis, with the subject and verb missing. If we put it back in, it would be: “Then they will go back to the patient planet below.” Harvey personifies the planet with the adjective “patient,” a nod to the patience required for this trip, and creates more music with alliteration.
Your Turn
Open with a base clause and at end of this clause include one or two words that will serve as the beginning of four consecutive phrases.
You’ll write four phrases, beginning with the same word(s) and using a similar grammatical structure (anaphora and parallelism).
End the sentence with a clause that echoes the opening grammatical structure. Can you use ellipsis to eliminate the subject and verb? Is there room for alliteration?
How did go?
What else do you see?
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I’ve taught “Style in Fiction,” “Word for Word,” and “Cultivating Your Prose” at the University of San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies since 2007. Please visit my website for all my books: ninaschuyler.com, including my novel Afterword, How to Write Stunning Sentences, and Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal.
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I love this book, I think it's beautifully written. Here's my attempt.
Next time, he thinks, I will stand up to my father, next time I will be fearless and strong, next time I won’t give in and cry, next time I will be intelligent and answer back, next time I won’t stammer and cower, then my father will be surprised and speechless.
They will each sleep for a year or so, a year of vast emptiness, a year of quiet forgetting, a year of renaissance hymns, a year of absence from us, then back to the infirm society that went on without them.
I'm working on a piece in a fairy tale style about people who sleep through pandemics and plagues. I add the explanation because I feel like my sentence is pretty abstract , but it was fun play with.