James Mather is a psychiatrist in his sixties. He is invited to take on a new group of patients. All he knows about them is that each one claims to have been abducted by aliens.
His wife, Deborah, is sceptical, but he gets going anyway. His patients tell mesmerising stories. There’s Anthony, for instance, who was camping one night by the Aral Sea; or Mary, the owner of a beauty salon, confronted by a ball of light moving towards her in her bedroom.
James’s research assistant Lucy Cheng sits in on each session. She’s an attractive young divorcee, who has made a study of anxiety, and who takes notes about each conversation.
Capture is a strange philosophical fable about what we can believe in a post-truth world. It will beguile and baffle its readers. Amanda Lohrey is an extraordinary writer. Her novel might be full of crazy stuff, but who could deny its sanity?
Q&A
Congratulations on the publication of Capture. The novel features the stories of people who believe, wholeheartedly, that they have been the subject of alien abduction. How did you balance the subject matter – one often viewed as implausible, if not pure fantasy – with the seriousness of psychiatric research?
I set out to make something strange seem plausible by creating characters that are pretty ordinary so that the reader can at least in part identify with them. As for the seriousness of psychiatric research, there have been several psychiatrists in real life who have treated patients who claimed to have had an experience of alien capture. One such was the late John Mack who at one time was head of psychiatry in the Harvard medical school.
The novel commences with an Author’s Note: ‘What follows is in the nature of fable and is no way intended to portray actual psychiatric research or therapeutic practice.’ As a mental health professional and researcher myself – who often reflects on the representation of my sector – this made me chuckle. Why did you opt to include this disclaimer?
My aim was to create a pleasurable and intriguing narrative that was also something different, not the usual relationships novel. To accomplish this, I needed the reader to suspend disbelief and their natural scepticism and just go with the story. It was up to me to make that story convincing enough to draw the reader in and, at least for the length of the novel, to overcome their initial resistance.
It was also obligatory on my part, ethically, to make it clear I was not suggesting this was an accurate account of any form of medical treatment. Hence, I describe it as a kind of fable which takes certain slightly crazy or extreme aspects of the way we live now, and juxtaposes them in order to raise certain questions. A fable in this instance is a make-believe narrative that works off what we already know in order to make the narrative sound reasonably plausible but makes no claim for absolute or definitive truth.
Capture’s protagonist, James Mather, struggles to make sense of his interviewee’s accounts. What potential meanings or interpretations of alien abduction were you drawn to, as you researched and wrote the novel?
I found all current explanations for claims of alien capture unconvincing. My personal view is that in the matter of alien existence we can’t hold any dogmatic position. We can’t prove aliens exist and we can’t prove that they don’t. This, I discovered, is the position of most scientists.
Capture explores what it means to be a believer, and what it means to be a sceptic. What might sceptics and believers gain to learn from each other?
From sceptics we learn to keep an open mind because new evidence on most contentious issues may be just around the corner. Any civilized society lives with a degree of doubt even though that can sometimes prove to be a psychological burden for some individuals. Some people crave certainty but that can lead to rigid and inflexible positions that can be both dangerous – persecuting those who disagree with you – and ultimately self-defeating.
Can you give us any hints about what you might be working on next?
I’m writing a short novel about a family set in the inner west of Sydney around 2010. It’s mostly seen through the eyes of a boy – and later, young man – as he tries to work out, by observing the adults around him, the meaning of right behaviour. So many novels are about trauma and pain and I want to write about a group of people who have their problems but are fundamentally good.
Capture is out now through Text Publishing.
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