Featured on Portsmouth Point: Literary Hope

By Dawn S, Year 13

I’m sure that over the last week a lot of you, like me, have felt a certain amount of existential dread in the aftermath of the US election. It’s easy to spiral into depressive thinking in times like these — but here are three recommendations if you find yourself in need of a dose of literary hope:

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

“The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour. When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it 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.”

It was announced this week that Orbital won the 2024 Booker prize, an honour which I think it very much deserves. It is a short novel that narrates 24 hours in the lives of six astronauts on a space station, in which they witness 16 sunrises and sunsets; over the course of these sixteen orbits, they contemplate the phenomenon of life on earth and wrangle with their place within it. The book contains very few concrete plot points, aside from a supertyphoon that is careening towards the Philippines and one of the astronauts receiving news that her mother has passed away — both tragedies, one personal and one global. Despite the melancholy tone of much of the narration, however, the overall experience of reading this novel for me was one of comfort: I was reminded how, ultimately, humans are united by love, and all the other complex and gritty things which happen between us exist within that context. It’s about humanity, earth, our place on the earth, our place in the universe, how we love each other, how we fail to love each other, and why all of this is ultimately both futile and of infinite importance. It approaches difficult concepts such as the climate emergency with such a tender touch, instilling us with hope and reminding us that yes, the situation is bad — but that negativity is not all that there is, and everything has the capacity to change.

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

“All her life she has been led to believe that she is a child born at the end of things: the empire, the era, the reign of men on earth. But in the glow of the scribes' enthusiasm, she senses that in a city like Urbino, beyond the horizon, other possibilities might exist, and in daydreams she takes flight across the Aegean, through her spread fingers, until she alights in a bright clean palace, full of Justice and Moderation, its rooms lined with books, free to anyone who can read them.”

Cloud Cuckoo Land is almost the opposite of Orbital, as the narrative is complex and the scope is vast: it centres around four separate narratives over seven centuries, each interacting with the same classical text — the fictional Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Greek writer Diogenes. It is the same manuscript of the text that exists within each narrative, bringing a real sense of human connection and mutual understanding to the novel, and thus presenting art as a unifying force and a form of defiance against cultural division. Each narrative features characters who believe themselves to be living at the end of civilisation: the enormous time period over which the book takes place proves that this is, of course, untrue; no character or civilisation ever has the full picture. We are in the perpetual position of believing that we are living on the brink of humanity’s existence — but the huge breadth of human experience displayed in Cloud Cuckoo Land shows that this is not the case. Humanity is complex, humanity causes and is hit by constant disasters, and yet, as in Orbital, the love we hold for one another turns out ultimately to rise above the fear and the disaster. Even Konstance, the fourteen-year-old girl who stumbles from a spaceship in the year 2146 into an Arctic settlement damaged by global warming, finds community and hope when she gets there. Cloud Cuckoo Land is a reminder that we are never living at the end of the story, and that redemption is always a possibility.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

“Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines. Jeevan was standing by the window when the lights went out.”

Station Eleven is a book that teaches us two things: firstly to value the world that we have, and secondly that even in a world in which we no longer have any of the things we take for granted, beauty prevails — there are always more things to value and hold close. The book takes place in the years surrounding a devastating global pandemic which wipes out 99% of the population. Before the pandemic, private artist Miranda lives in the shadow of her wealthy husband, Hollywood star Arthur Leander; in the aftermath, Leander’s fame is obsolete and one of the only copies of Miranda’s comics — titled Station Eleven — is one of travelling actor Kirsten’s treasured possessions. Kirsten is part of the Travelling Symphony, a group which performs Shakespeare plays and orchestral recitals to settlements which have grown up out of the devastation. Mandel creates a tragic yet beautiful world, in which people are more separated and yet more connected than ever before; like Cloud Cuckoo Land, it is about how art and literature pervade in an ever-changing society. Station Eleven has the most well-executed ‘happy ending’ I have ever read, and will make you see the mundanities of the world in a completely new light (prepare to never experience airports and train stations in the same way again).

So, there are my recommendations. If you end up reading any of these please do let me know — I’d love to discuss them with you! I want to finish with a quote from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (a book which is largely irrelevant to what I have been talking about, but whose final page sums up perfectly what I want to say):

And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”