Capture (Amanda Lohrey, Text)

In Amanda Lohrey’s Capture, ageing psychiatrist James Mather is commissioned to research psychological explanations for alien capture experiences. His interviews with “experiencers” – whose stories he quickly finds to be frustratingly “all different, and yet somehow all the same” – seek patterns, and therefore meaning, in a phenomenon under-explored within his discipline. Lohrey’s tenth novel is realist rather than sci-fi: a taut yet contemplative story whose apparent simplicity belies its scope. The central abduction narratives, along with the fascinations of secondary characters, often facilitate digressions into treatises on political and psychosocial ideas: “longevity medicine” and pronatalism; sanity; deep-state cover-ups; artisanal sourdough; mind/body connections; folklore, archetype, secularisation and belief. Mather, quietly navigating his own struggles, is left to ponder these notions alongside the reader. Stylistically, Lohrey’s first-person narrative echoes Kafka’s short story “A Report to the Academy”. Though thematically diverse, the novel and this earlier short story vibrate with several shared concerns: questions of self, human nature, knowledge, progress, reality and a pervasive sense of disillusionment. While Mather senses his investigations hint at “a set of symptoms … that said a great deal about the way we live now and what is missing in our lives”, Capture moves not towards answers but questions. In this, it shares an affinity with Brendan Colley’s The Season for Flying Saucers, another novel that turns its gaze skyward while remaining firmly anchored in terrestrial enquiry.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Anica Boulanger-Mashberg is a freelance editor and writer, and a bookseller at the Hobart Bookshop. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

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