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Amanda Lohrey's Capture plays out as a sequence of conversations in strange rooms.
The centre of the novel is the consulting room of psychiatrist James Mather, lately stripped of all its therapeutic paintings and suggestive curios to a state of clinical blankness. There is also the apartment where the psychiatrist and his former lover regard each other from "two enormous couches in the centre of the room". And there are the rooms of a shiatsu sensei, cavernous and empty, except for a "big glass aquarium of shimmering fish".
Shadowing all these rooms, in this novel of the ordinary and the divine, are the dream-interiors of UFOs. James is studying people who claim to have been abducted by aliens, and Capture is partly composed of his interviews with them. "I wake up in this weird room, this weird shiny room," says Mary, a beautician.
But it feels like every room in Lohrey's novel is a weird shiny room, where humans are studied with curiosity and partial incomprehension.
Review: Capture - Amanda Lohrey (Text Publishing)
Lohrey was raised as a Catholic in postwar working-class Hobart. Though she fled the faith as a teenager, her fiction has always been concerned with the personal and political dimensions of belief.
Her later career works - including the multi-award-winning The Labyrinth (2021) and The Conversion (2023) - all focus on myth, dreams and the limits of rationality. In these novels, a lonely and adrift protagonist takes on a quixotic project in the hope of giving their life a meaning and a shape.
In Capture, Lohrey sketches James as a quietly self-doubting rationalist. Though he deals in symbols and narratives, he puts himself in the science camp. He does not read fiction because it "mostly lacks substance". He keeps himself free from the "weeds of superstition".
His assistant, Lucy Cheng, is one of "you people in the humanities": a historian with a doctorate on 19th-century medicine, who has a "healthy scepticism of the DSM" and an awareness of psychology's history of oppression. "What, at any given moment," Lucy asks, "is credible science?"
To his colleagues, James is a man "radiating complacency", yet his glassy demeanour is already faintly rippled with uncertainty. "We make it up as we go along," he replies to Lucy's question. "Unless we are adhering to a rigidly prescribed set of doctrines, how else could it be?"
James wields his doubt as a professional virtue, but it also affects him in a more gnawingly existential way. After a long career, he is approaching retirement with a sense of incompleteness. Having broken his back coming off a motorbike in his twenties, the arthritic pain in his spine keeps returning him to a body he would prefer to transcend.
So he takes up the alien capture research on a whim, as a last hurrah and a grand distraction. "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."
What he expects is an enjoyably diverting cavalcade of Roswell truthers and hillbillies: "in my preparatory reading," he says, "I have gained the impression that captives belonged to a lower socio-economic category, the kind of people prone to paranoid fears, and dreams so vivid they cannot be distinguished from reality."
There is something here of the liberal political imagination in the age of Trump, which too readily blames the rise of a post-truth world on poor people who are easily tricked.
At first, the psychiatrist seems confident in his ability to explain away the experiences of his subjects. He concludes that his first case, Anthony, may be suffering "unconscious grief at the prospect of having no heirs," which has "induced a psychotic episode".
James's favoured technique is to get patients talking on their pet topic, watching how they light up and how they construct their narratives. He encourages the beautician Mary to detail the art of eyelash extensions, while he savours "the accuracy, indeed a kind of eloquence, with which she describes her technique."
He does the same to everyone. He encourages his assistant Lucy's young son to monologue about Transformers, and his grown-up son to rhapsodise about bread baking. "I am content to listen as he describes his art," he says.
This is how the psychiatrist understands other humans, but these are also moments when he finds humans to be at their most obsessive, arcane and alien. Rituals and icons - the "everyday epiphany" of a fresh loaf of bread, or the plastic gods of a small child - belong to a realm of shamanic experience James cannot fully comprehend. "My psyche is stripped bare of consoling ritual," he says, "and what remains is the pain in my spine."
The emotional core of the novel is a scene in which James contemplates the evening rituals and icons of his wife. 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 opposite the bed, Deborah keeps a framed photograph from 1870 that she discovered during her archival research. It shows a bargemaster's wife and baby aboard a canal boat. The boat's confined living space is 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? It is so unlike Deborah to romanticise the past. My instinct tells me that these late-night glances are a rite of mourning, but for what? Could it be that some infant, some lost or unborn child, lives aboard the boat of my wife's dreams?
James considers showing the photograph to his assistant Lucy, to see what another woman might make of it, but he thinks better of it: "It is not, after all, my shrine."
His wife and her household gods are a dark canal James cannot fathom. So he is unsettled when he interviews Bernard, a draughtsman with the city planning authority, who claims to have experienced a religious awakening in his close encounter with a UFO, and who mourns every day for his absent alien gods.
In a pair of wonderfully freewheeling scenes, James takes his incomprehension to a folklorist and to a theologian. The latter suggests that 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."
The confidence James took into the project is already evaporating. His subjects are sober and middle class; their stories, though extraordinary, are "linear, consistent and rational". Every one of his theories seems inadequate.
This leaves him to contemplate the ultimate horror: that these experiences cannot be adequately captured by the language of psychiatry as delusions or symptoms, projections or wish fulfilments. What if these things actually happened? What if the gods are real?
"I have arrived in a cul-de-sac of unknowing," he says. "I no longer believe that I can account for and interpret the reality of others."
When Flick, the folklorist and James's ex-lover, tries to talk him out of his newfound doubts about doubt, the psychiatrist resorts to the language used by alien abductees themselves. Only those who witnessed the interviews in his consulting room, he says, can really understand:
Her logic is impeccable but rankles with me. You were not in the room, I want to say. 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 after all her theories are applied, in my mind there remains a surplus of meaning.
And so it comes back to a conversation in a room: to the psychiatrist's art, which is also the novelist's art, of reading the vibrations: probing, diagnosing and interpreting the alien otherness of human consciousness. What if, Lohrey asks, the textures of everyday life - with all of its attachments and private obsessions - are too much for the psychiatrist or the novelist to capture?
