Capture
by Amanda Lohrey
ISBN9781923058842
Reviewed by JAMES GOBBEY
Overwhelmed by misinformation spread through news and social media,certainty has been rendered uncertain. The truth is more malleable than ever to the demands of capital and empire. But irrespective of what is true, we are shaped by what we believe has occurred. In Amanda Lohrey’s latest novel we are forced to reckon with the persistent flexibility of truth, and the continued re-emergence of the unknowable.
Capture centres on the research of James Mather, and his research assistant, Lucy Cheng, into experiences of alien abduction. James is a late career psychiatrist who has recently completed a project examining the suicide of young men; a process that has taken “seven years and left [him] prone to migraine” (4). His latest project—an undertaking he expects will go “against the grain of seriousness” (10)—acts as catalyst for a series of interviews with those who allege they were captured by extra-terrestrials. Referred to as “experiencers,” the subjects of James’s research are those who “have in the past been reluctant to recount their experiences of fear of being judged” (67). These are well functioning members of society, despite their experiences of abduction. James’s peers and wife are sceptical, arguing that the experiencers are, “nutters … attention seekers” and a risk to James’s “credibility” (13-4). James persists irrespective of their concerns, and the experience is unlike what he expects. As he states, “After a decade of contemplating the despair of young men I looked forward to immersing myself in profound silliness. I could not have been more wrong” (19).
The patients that facilitate James’s research are a testament to the elusiveness of truth. They use their personal and professional successes to hide from judgement and conceal what they believe has occurred. James enters this research expecting the unserious but encounters a mirror to his previous project and his own life. The suicide of young men is often characterised by narratives of buried emotion, hidden from others—an unknown internal strife that mirrors the shame of the novel’s experiencers. Likewise, James hides aspects of his own reality. He experiences significant pain from an injury sustained in his twenties and explains that the pain is “relieved only by opioids that I take in quantities unknown to my wife” (15). He is a narrator skilled in concealment and revelation.
James may be skilled in deception, but he does not assume the same from his patients. He asks himself, “what if my experiencers are not deluded?” (199). Instead, the subjects of this project inhabit a reality characterised by the flexibility of truth. Their revelations are real to them and become a truth that extends beyond personal experience. This perforation of reality impacts James to the extent that the interviews are like “sharing an alternate universe” with the experiencers that he does “not want in any way to domesticate” (45). He is desperate to keep the reality of his work separate from his normal life. When James is questioned about this research, and the altered perception it cultivates, he becomes frustrated. The experiencers are sharing something, developing a particular affective relationship: “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; its a different order of experience. Outside the room, it’s all words” (117). Lohrey here speaks to the unknowability of another’s experience. Words, laden with history and culturally specific connotations, struggle to accurately convey meaning. It is only through the “vibration” of these experiences, limited to the confines of James’ office, that they can approach something nearer to truth.
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The author’s note describes Capture as told “in the nature of a fable.” This informs the novel’s interest in the stories we tell about our lives, alluding to the sense that our stories are not new, but are instead retold throughout time.
Capture opens with James walking across a university lawn, listening to the ravings of “the campus madman, he who stood every morning in the middle of the quad, Bible in hand, to declaim verses from the Old Testament: curses, lamentations and prophecies of damnation” (1). Soon after, James is halfway around the world, in a cafe “almost unchanged from the 1920’s, where you can hear the chimes of the medieval clock in the Old Town and feel for a few hours that you are a part of pre-war Europe” (2). In each of these instances, James encounters the past in different forms—both of which directly shape his perception of reality.
Throughout Capture, the resurgence of ideas across time occurs in the most unlikely of places: Cafe Europa, a frequent setting in the novel, is housed in “an old warehouse” (46) renovated with reclaimed timber; Transformers are compared to “the Biblical story of Lucifer’s rebellion and his battle with the Archangel Michael” (127); Pronatalism, longevity, and “descendent worship” (152) are a source of historical interest because these powerful contemporary movements are “not new” (205). The everyday becomes a continuous site through which the past emerges, impacting the sense we make of the world.
We live with the past around us everyday, and Lohrey activates this premise to recognise the recurrence of past experiences. During the period James and Lucy are interviewing experiencers, Lucy suffers a nightmare in which she stands on a box, surrounded by people, unable to sort through a large stack of cards. As the dream progresses, Lucy is forced to hand over her body to the crowd:
people are gawping at me, and then they start coming towards me with pathetic expressions on their faces, asking me for something, and I can’t make out what they want…they just…’ She hesitates. ‘They just want, and I have to peel off a piece of my skin to give them, every one of them, it’s like I’m covered in scales, half-human, half-animal (123).
The nightmare is explained away simply by James: an overworked single mother has a bad dream. But the aesthetics of the nightmare have more prescient political resonance. By turning flesh into currency, there are implications as to the power-dynamics of capture and its historical relevance.
The experiences of capture detailed in this novel are bodily. They tend to see the body taken and acted upon against the will of the abductee. Lohrey is a Tasmanian author and so writes in the context of colonial capture and the suffering of First Nations people. While colonial experiences are not directly referenced throughout the novel, this dream and the stories of experiencers echo the suffering experienced by First Nations people at the hand of empire. Throughout this novel, recurrence forces the reader to question the kinds of truths we deny or favour, and the way these restructure our relationship with the world.
Thematically, Capture sits alongside Lohrey’s latest set of novels, The Labyrinth and The Conversion. All three look at recurrence, the persistence of history in our contemporary moment, and its impact on truth-telling. But while her last two novels favoured interiority, Capture turns outward, seeking insight through dialogue across alternate perceptions of reality.
Lohrey takes the spectre of the unknown, of alien abduction, and interprets it as a method to explore the stories that recur time and again. As one character in the novel states, “your flying saucer is a high-tech version of an old story” (115). Lohrey leaves us with a question that lingers at the heart of this novel: does the re-emergence of the same ideas, the same needs, through time, lead us to some kind of truth about ourselves? While in Capture the actual truth fails to mean much, the novel emphasises the importance of searching for meaning, and the recognition of our role in an ever-emergent human history.
JAMES GOBBEY (he/him) is a writer living on the unceded land of the Palawa people of Lutruwita/Tasmania. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania, researching environmental crisis and the twenty-first century novel. His non-fiction work has previously been published with Mascara Literary Review, Aniko Press, and others, and his fiction was featured in Fondue‘s shape/shift anthology. .