An authorial disclaimer leads Amanda Lohrey’s exhilarating new novel Capture: “What follows is in the nature of a fable and is in no way intended to portray actual psychiatric research or therapeutic practice.”
The novel is narrated by Dr James Mather – Jim – a psychiatrist in his 60s who has reluctantly taken on a research project that requires him to study “experiencers”, people who claim to have been abducted by aliens. Jim is a diligent narrator, a “trained observer” alert to gestures of self-betrayal and sly subtexts, at least in others. Why, this narrator might ask, is the reader being warned against taking things too literally?
Lohrey might be framing Capture as a fable, but Jim, decidedly, is not. The animating fiction of Capture is Jim’s intention to set out his unpublished research findings. He strives to make his experience legible as an account of “actual psychiatric research” – but before he’s even allowed to say a word, he has been undermined by the novel’s paratext.
Jim has recently completed a decade-long study of suicide, “contemplating the despair of young men”. So when his mentor Helena proposes that he research alien abductions, he views this new venture as a “bizarre and marginal project” but agrees, hoping that its “profound silliness” might offer a reprieve from the misery he has been observing. His wife and colleagues warn him about reputational risk; “some members of the ethics committee were incredulous,” he reports.
Some readers might also be incredulous that one of Australia’s most celebrated and serious-minded authors has elected to write a novel about alien abductees. And yet over four decades, Lohrey’s consistently surprising fictions have been typified by a willingness to take tremendous risks, including The Labyrinth, which won the 2021 Miles Franklin award.
Lohrey’s novels confront readers with characters whose experiences challenge the techno-rationalism that circumscribes the institutions of contemporary life, and they withhold soothing resolution. It is evidence of Lohrey’s skill, as if anyone needed it, that a plot that teeters on the edge of profound silliness should be a vehicle for urgent questions about how we make meaning of our own lived experiences, and those of others.
Jim is a counterpart to the protagonist of Lohrey’s A Short History of Richard Kline (2015), a software analyst whose desperate quest for meaning leads him to follow a guru, and to Stephen, one of the main characters of Camille’s Bread (1995), an accounts clerk who is remaking himself by training as a shiatsu masseur and adhering to a strict macrobiotic diet. Like Jim, these men come up against limits to their scepticism that demolish their understandings of the world, and themselves.
“At the outset of my research,” writes Jim, “I had formed a somewhat patronising view that I was likely to be dealing with people whose unconscious desires had manifested as a perverse means of escaping the banality of the mundane world.”
Jim does not conduct his sessions with the experiencers alone: “I need another person in the room for multiple reasons, including that there must always be a witness so that later there can be no accusations of malpractice.” The other person in the room is Jim’s research assistant, Lucy Cheng, a social historian who, like the experiencers, provokes a loosening of Jim’s certainties. It is in Jim’s account of his relationship with Lucy that the reader first detects that Jim might not be an accurate barometer of his own desires and defences: “it is also to the point that there is no chemistry between us,” he insists.
Lucy is charged with recording what it is like to be in the room: her role is to “document general demeanour, posture, gestures, mannerisms, a quality of stillness, or perhaps a persistent restlessness, body language that a transcript cannot capture”. As their project becomes more intense and strange, Jim and Lucy often remind each other that people who weren’t “in the room” with the experiencers can’t possibly comprehend their testimony: “In the room there’s an electricity, a vibration; it’s a different order of experience.”
Unable to categorise the experiencers, let alone draw conclusions from their testimony, Jim abandons the project. Later, Helena chastises him for “a dereliction of your scholarly obligation to make sense of things”. To be captured is to be held in a confined space, physically, ideologically, morally; it is to relinquish control. In the room with the experiencers, Jim finds himself in “a cul de sac of unknowing”; he must find a new way to make sense of things.
Capture won’t resolve any reader questions about the truth of alien encounters. Why should it? Lohrey has never infantilised her readers with pat answers. Like Jim, Lohrey is preoccupied with a “different order of experience”, with forms of experience and embodied knowledge that challenge empiricism.
Capture might be read literally, I suppose, as a novel about academic burnout and late-career epistemological crisis. And yet, to read it this way would be to diminish the conflicting metaphors, ideas and images that proliferate in Jim’s narrative. To make sense of it requires submission to an order of thinking beyond the literal, to the enlarging logic of dreams; to be captured by the fable, or perhaps liberated by it. This is a superb novel, at once intellectually gripping and deeply moving, and commendable for its intrepidity.
Capture by Amanda Lohrey is out now in Australia ($34.99; Text Publishing)
