“Raw space is a panther, feral and primal,” the author informs us in the opening paragraph. The astronauts “dream it stalking through their quarters.” There are six of them fast asleep in bags while “a handspan away beyond a skin of metal the universe unfolds in simple eternities.” I took a deep semi-sceptical breath. This is heavy duty whipped double cream alcohol-laced over-writing with a fancy meringue topping. It is meant to seduce and impress the erudite. “Look here, reader, I’m a genius conjuror of sumptuous figures of speech and oxymoronic paradoxes,” it announces immodestly. “So knuckle down to a proper linguistic feast and admire this fabulous textual concoction as much as I admire it myself.”

Well obviously The Booker adjudicators felt compelled to obey this injunction because they gave Samantha first prize. Okay then, fancy pants, I think to myself, you ain’t going to find me quite such a wimpy pushover. Bring it on, bulky spacesuits and all that adjectival stuff, and damned be him who first cries, “Hold! Enough!.”

In chapter two we’re introduced to Roman, Shaun and Chie whose mum just died. Nobody knows how to comfort her. Sam tells us that astronauts often think that Earth is actually heaven and they are in an afterlife already. What comfort Chie might get from that remains unclear, however. On to chapter three where we meet Pietro, Nell and Anton doing their keep fit gym routines. Everybody is ambushed by a sudden happiness, a desire not to leave the space lab. Is this false consciousness? A professional coping mechanism setting in? Have they really bonded into a happy international family?

As I push onwards into the thankfully short novel I am forced to reflect on the very strange nature of the universe. It may have no boundaries. Do we humans have a purpose within it? Was it created by some omniscient being who has our long term interests at heart? Are there other life forms besides humanity somewhere within the billions of galaxies? These and related questions occur to all of us marooned landlubbers, of course, but how much more barbed and pertinent they must become to those 250 miles up in space with a radically detached viewpoint of our terrestrial habitat! This is what the book is all about. The sharpening and alteration of consciousness that happens in the mind of the space explorer. Is it curiosity or ingratitude that’s led us up here in our tin can? opines one of the astronauts. Another ponders whether progress is a good thing or not. Beauty is another subject that raises its ugly head,- excuse my oxymoron, I think I’ve caught her disease!

Suddenly I found myself reminded of Aldous Huxley’s famous comment when he was experimenting with LSD. Someone asked him, “How do you experience time, Aldous?” to which he eventually mumbled the reply, “There’s a lot of it.” Up in space an astronaut learns that Time and Chronology are entirely different concepts. You measure time in a continuum of anguish not in units of hours and days – a truth they might easily have found out on mother earth by talking to anyone who’s been haunted by a dead lover. The astronauts float quite literally around, each involved in their own scientific project, as night overtakes day and then is overtaken by night etc at a dizzying speed. We are told a bit about their relatives and back stories. One of them is a Christian of the creationist persuasion. Chie is a mouse whisperer. With any luck we’ll have some rumpy pumpy soon – anything to disturb the monotony of teleological images of the planet and oxymoronic flourishes.

Then in orbit seven it happens! Our author launches into a two page ideological rant! Who guessed she had such bile in her? It begins with the announcement that a desire has collectively taken hold of the astronauts. My priapic antenna began to vibrate. Here we go at last, I thought, pants off, writhing bottoms, gasps of harder please harder – but no. “It’s the desire to protect this huge yet tiny earth,” she continues. The planet has been ravaged and ruined by power crazed hoodlums colloquially known as politicians – people who have got where they are not by any revolutionary percipience or wisdom, she asserts, but “by being louder, bigger, more ostentatious, more unscrupulously wanting of the play of power than those around them.” It’s a wonderful diatribe and all the better for being so unlike anything that preceded it. Bugger me, Samantha is an eco warrior in rather abstruse literary clothing. Any second now she’ll start quoting Marx and Lovelock.

But she doesn’t. It’s straight back to the grinding tedious rituals of the astronauts and to long passages of cosmic and metaphysical speculation. In the long life of the universe humanity has only been around for a couple of minutes and it will almost as soon be gone, she drones. Really, Samantha? I’m pooping my pants. A fluttering of puerile paradoxes follows, such as expansion expanding into itself and emptiness birthing itself. Excuse me while I stifle a yawn. Come back Brian Cox, all is forgiven. At least Cox has a sense of humour and plays slide guitar. Samantha is like an over earnest Oracle, recently descended from the seclusion of Mount Olympus, who has no idea how old hat and stale her prognostications are. Does she suppose we’ve spent our lives reading bodice ripping yarns and the Beano? It appears she does.

What the book is good at is creating a sense of the corporality and astonishment and confusion of being out there in space. Where it falls flat is in the lack of any suspenseful character narrative. The astronauts are one dimensional. They come across as sharing a nerdish monomaniacal compulsion incubated during childhood. It was Captain Kirk who first told me that space was the final frontier, the only remaining wilderness left to be explored. But these poor sods are merely on the outermost fringe of that immense wilderness, the footsoldier pioneers of whatever great next adventures the future holds. In a militaristic sense they are cannon fodder, in a scientific sense merely bean counters. It is hard to disagree with Samantha’s ultimate paradox that our lives are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, that we matter greatly and not at all. We are programmed by a survival instinct even though there may well be nothing remotely worth surviving for.

In the penultimate orbit she gives us yet another Cook’s tour of the planet. Elegantly executed but by now repetitive and showy offy like an exercise conducted by an obsessive alpha grade creative writing student. “Yes I know!” it screams in self-adulating Liz Truss mode. “Is your mind boggled by my flamboyant genius, no need to cheer, darlings!” Whatever next? I wonder. Maybe Sam’s going to crash the spaceship just like Liz crashed the economy? There’s a crack in the wall of the Russian dorm and it’s gradually getting bigger. But of course she doesn’t. At least not until a few years hence and long after we’ve finished reading. There’s a last lingering look at people huddled in a church waiting for the hurricane driven waters to ebb away, there is a short riff about the musical sounds of the planets………..then it’s done. We can leave the precious and bookish aesthetes to drown her writing in hyperbolic praise while we toddle off to pour a glass of plonk and ferret out a properly interesting story.

2 STARS **