Amanda Lohrey's novel Capture unfolds as a series of conversations in strange rooms. Central to the story is the consulting room of psychiatrist James Mather, stripped of therapeutic paintings and curios, now a clinical blank. There is also the apartment where James and his former lover sit on "two enormous couches in the centre of the room." And the rooms of a shiatsu sensei, cavernous and empty except for a "big glass aquarium of shimmering fish." Shadowing these spaces, in this novel of the ordinary and the divine, are the dream-interiors of UFOs.
The Study of Alien Abduction
James is researching people who claim alien abduction, and Capture partly consists of his interviews with them. "I wake up in this weird room, this weird shiny room," says Mary, a beautician. Yet it feels like every room in Lohrey's novel is a weird shiny room, where humans are studied with curiosity and partial incomprehension.
Lohrey, raised Catholic in postwar Hobart, left the faith as a teenager but her fiction has always explored belief's personal and political dimensions. Her later works, including the award-winning The Labyrinth (2021) and The Conversion (2023), focus on myth, dreams, and rationality's limits. In these novels, a lonely protagonist undertakes a quixotic project to give life meaning.
James Mather: A Rationalist in Doubt
In Capture, James is a quietly self-doubting rationalist. He deals in symbols and narratives but aligns with science. He avoids fiction as "mostly lacking substance" and keeps free from the "weeds of superstition." His assistant, Lucy Cheng, a historian with a doctorate on 19th-century medicine, has a "healthy scepticism of the DSM" and awareness of psychology's oppressive history. "What, at any given moment," Lucy asks, "is credible science?" James replies, "We make it up as we go along. Unless we are adhering to a rigidly prescribed set of doctrines, how else could it be?"
James wields doubt as a professional virtue, but it gnaws at him existentially. Approaching retirement with a sense of incompleteness, and with arthritic pain from a past motorcycle accident, he takes up alien capture research as a last hurrah. "By immersing myself in another reality I might disengage my mind from its prison of flesh and bone," he thinks, "for in my worst moments, pain threatened to unhinge my sense of self." He expects a "cavalcade of Roswell truthers and hillbillies," but his subjects prove otherwise.
Everyday Epiphanies
There is something of the liberal political imagination in the age of Trump, blaming post-truth on easily tricked poor people. Initially, James feels confident explaining away his subjects' experiences. He concludes that first case Anthony may suffer "unconscious grief at the prospect of having no heirs," inducing a psychotic episode. James's technique is to get patients talking on their pet topics, watching them light up. He encourages Mary to detail eyelash extensions, savoring "the accuracy, indeed a kind of eloquence, with which she describes her technique." He does the same with Lucy's young son about Transformers, and his own son about bread baking. "I am content to listen as he describes his art," he says. These moments reveal humans at their most obsessive, arcane, and alien. Rituals and icons—the "everyday epiphany" of fresh bread or plastic gods—belong to a shamanic realm James cannot fully grasp. "My psyche is stripped bare of consoling ritual," he says, "and what remains is the pain in my spine."
The Emotional Core
The novel's emotional core is a scene where James contemplates his wife's evening rituals and icons. He recalls "watching Deborah prepare for bed, an unvarying ritual of small observances, never rushed." In her absence, her presence is felt as a "constellation of intimate traces." On the bureau, Deborah keeps a framed 1870 photograph of a bargemaster's wife and baby on a canal boat, the living space decorated like a shrine. "Every night before turning out her lamp my wife glances at this icon. On many nights it's the last thing she sees. Why?" James wonders if it's a rite of mourning for a lost child. He considers showing the photo to Lucy but thinks better of it: "It is not, after all, my shrine."
Alien Otherness
His wife and her household gods are a dark canal James cannot fathom. He is unsettled interviewing Bernard, a draughtsman who claims a religious awakening from a UFO encounter and mourns for absent alien gods. James consults a folklorist and a theologian. The latter suggests this is "just one of the many symptoms of the god-shaped hole in our culture... We've been deprived of metaphysical hope so we take it where we can find it." James's confidence evaporates. His subjects are sober and middle class; their stories are "linear, consistent and rational." Every theory seems inadequate. He confronts the horror that these experiences cannot be captured as delusions or symptoms. "What if these things actually happened? What if the gods are real?" He says, "I have arrived in a cul-de-sac of unknowing. I no longer believe that I can account for and interpret the reality of others."
When Flick, the folklorist and ex-lover, tries to talk him out of his doubts, James uses the language of alien abductees: "You were not in the room. In the room there's an electricity, a vibration; it's a different order of experience. Outside the room, it's all words." And so it returns to a conversation in a room: the psychiatrist's art, also the novelist's art, of reading vibrations, probing, diagnosing, and interpreting the alien otherness of human consciousness. Lohrey asks: what if the textures of everyday life—with attachments and private obsessions—are too much for the psychiatrist or novelist to capture?
