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........

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