Review of NIGHTWATCHING by Tracy Sierra

 3 Stars

This novel received a lot of publicity when it was a Jimmy Fallon book club pick. I think it’s been over-hyped.

A mother is home with her two young children, aged 8 and 5, during a blizzard. When she realizes there’s an intruder in the house, the three of them hide in a tiny secret compartment in their old house. She has to keep her children quiet so as not to alert the intruder. When she realizes who he is and what he wants, her fear intensifies. Even after not finding them, he doesn’t leave and resorts to taunting her. When an opportunity arises, she flees the house to find help.

Because the book plays on our fears of a home invasion with the lives of children threatened, there is a lot of tension. The problem is that the reader is frequently pulled away from the danger by the woman’s thoughts and flashbacks. For example, when she senses the presence of the intruder, she starts thinking about her son’s nightmares and how she and her husband dealt with them. Such thoughts at that time are unrealistic. The flashbacks to her past are interesting but, again, because they interupt events, they lessen the level of suspense.

What is emphasized by these flashbacks is that the protagonist has been patronized and disbelieved by many men. Even her husband questions her interpretation of an event involving her father-in-law. The author examines what happens when a woman is not believed, but the amount of gaslighting and victim-blaming is over the top. She is thought of as “irresponsible, culpable, suspect” and lying, exaggerating and hysterical. Though the father-in-law and the police are especially good at denigrating her, it’s difficult to find any man with mostly positive qualities.

There are a number of elements that irked me. The characters are not given names; they’re only identified as daughter, son, father-in-law, husband, etc. The only person named is the intruder and he is called Corner. Why he’s assigned this designation is obvious, but it’s just weird. The misogynistic, incompetent police trope becomes ridiculous and annoying. And the reactions to the woman’s vitiligo are also extreme: she’s described as disfigured and questioned about contagion.

This is a debut novel and it has the weaknesses of a novice writer. Some will find it a suspenseful thriller, but for me the most frightening thing was the reminder that “suffering and misfortune fall as wide and uniformly as snow.”

Review of ORBITAL by Samantha Harvey

 4 Stars

My first review of 2025 is of the Booker Prize winner of 2024.

Six astronauts, four men and two women, are aboard a space station. Roman and Anton are from Russia, Chie is Japanese, Nell is from the U.K., Pietro is Italian, and Shaun is American. We experience a day in their lives during which they complete sixteen orbits of Earth. The reader learns about their scientific studies and about the difficulties of life in a cramped space station and the stresses of prolonged weightlessness.

But this is a novel with little plot. We do learn a bit about the lives and interests of the crew and some events occurring on Earth, but the focus is on the astronauts’ thoughts and reactions to looking at their home planet. They are always captivated and astonished by Earth, so the book is really a meditation about the beauty and vulnerability of our planet.

As the space station orbits various parts of Earth, there are dazzling descriptions of its splendour. Africa, for instance, “is the paint-splattered, ink-leached, crumpled-satin, crumbled-pastel overflowing-fruit-bowl continent of chaotic perfection, the continent of salt pans and red sedimented floodplain and the nerve networks of splaying rivers and mountains that bubble up from the plains green and velvety like mould growth.” One orbit gives views of French Polynesia, “the islands like cell samples, the atolls opal lozenges . . . the arc of smoking volcanoes on the Caribbean Plate. It’s Uzbekistan in an expanse of ochre and brown, the snowy mountainous beauty of Kyrgyzstan. The clean and brilliant Indian Ocean of blues untold. The apricot desert of Takla Makan traced about with the faint confluencing and parting lines of creek beds.”

What is also emphasized is how the planet has been “shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything.” The damage humans have done is described: “Every swirling neon or red algal bloom in the polluted, warming, overfished Atlantic . . . Every retreating or retreated or disintegrating glacier, every granite boulder of every mountain laid newly bare by snow that has never before melted, every scorched and blazing forest or bush, every shrinking ice sheet, every burning oil spill, the discolouration of a Mexican reservoir which signals the invasion of water hyacinths feeding on untreated sewage, a distorted flood-bulged river . . . or the prolonged pinking of evaporated lakes, or the Gran Chaco’s brown seepage of cattle ranch where once was rainforest, the green-blue geometries of evaporation pools where lithium is mined from the brine, or Tunisian salt flats in cloisonné pink, or the altered contour of a coastline where sea is reclaimed . . . or a vanishing mangrove forest in Mumbai, or the hundreds of acres of greenhouses which make the entire southern tip of Spain reflective in the sun.”

Of course, on the space station boundaries between countries are not visible: “a sense of friendliness and peace prevails, since even at night there’s only one man-made border in the whole of the world . . . That’s all civilisation has to show for its divisions, and by day even that has gone.” For the astronauts, the station is a “nationless, borderless outpost” where they “drink each other’s recycled urine . . . [and] breathe each other’s recycled air.” The message for humans is clear.

Humans tend to think of themselves and their planet as exceptional, but “in fact it’s a planet of normalish size and normalish mass rotating about an average star in a solar system of average everything in a galaxy of innumerable many, and that the whole thing is going to explode or collapse.” The earth is not everything but “it’s not nothing” either. Likewise, our lives are “inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once. . . . We matter greatly and not at all. . . . your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which is nothing, and also much more than everything.”

Regardless, Earth is worth preserving. The astronauts think, “maybe all of us born to [Earth] have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it.”

Though the book is short, really more of a novella, it should, I think, be read in snippets rather than as a whole. Pick it up, read a chapter, and put it down. The lyrical language should be savoured and the ideas deserve thought. It takes time to ponder whether progress is beautiful: each rocket has boosters which “at lift-off burn the fuel of a million cars” and human ventures in space have resulted in “Two hundred million things orbiting at twenty-five thousand miles an hour and sandblasting the veneer of space.”

Reading the book is a good way of beginning a new year. It reminds us of the beauty that surrounds us and, though humbling in some ways, also offers hope.