Six astronauts are bobbing about in a spacecraft, looking out at their planet as they circle it. From up here, 250 miles above the surface, Japan is a wisp. The Philippines appear “scarily frail”. Though the views are on a planetary scale, the object of their mesmerised observation is as intricate as a Fabergé egg. All of Europe is “outlined with fine precision”, ringed by a golden thread of night-lit roads. Autumn blooms in the Jiuzhaigou valley, Tunisian salt flats glow in cloisonné pink. The astronauts who turn and turn through Samantha Harvey’s finely crafted meditation on the Earth, beauty and human aspiration are in the process of understanding themselves in new ways, too.
Harvey has long been a fearless explorer in wild places. She started with The Wilderness, accompanying a man with Alzheimer’s into regions far out beyond the usual signposts of today’s date and the prime minister’s name. Each book since then has been as conceptually rugged as it is stylistically honed. In her 2018 novel The Western Wind, troubled parishioners make their confessions in a remote 15th-century village where the river breaks its banks and facts slip from their moorings. Then came a work of nonfiction, The Shapeless Unease, a bracing study of insomnia and its murky terrains.
