This was a very unexpected read, received as an advanced copy from NetGalley.

I won’t go into detail on the ins and outs of how it is written as it has been discussed many times before, I will focus on my reaction to the narrative.

The first half felt like a slow, somewhat aloof introduction to a typical chick lit novel. Sad lonely man meets cute girl... cue awkward dates and discussions and an opinion from an elderly relative... the narrative was a little self indulgent but it was readable enough. The second half, following in the footsteps of its inspirer, divulges into a question and answer session from the sad lonely man’s perspective. It’s dry and frustratingly long, however the author perceptively relays the thought torrent of mental illness. It is truly exhausting and in this way she excels in getting the point across. The sudden turn in narrative at the end draws the scenario perfectly to its conclusion and the subsequent feeling the reader gets is spot on in her attempts to make the reader feel the stages of mental illness.

Consequently I would recommend this book to everyone. Not for a relaxed, pleasurable, joyful read, but for a very eloquent insight into the lives of people with mental illness. The consequences of reading this could be life changing or life affirming and for that I can only applaud the author. ( )

I sank deeply into this novel about Luke, a Joycean scholar, who is forced into a difficult decision when an old family secret is revealed.

I love the stuff on Joyce and [Ulysses], and as I've been teetering on taking it off the shelf, it makes me want to do so even more. I suspect the novel has more references than someone who hasn't read the book will pick up. ( )

A novel that pays glorious homage to Joyce? Of course I was always going to read Mary Costello's The River Capture!

(For those new to my blog, James Joyce's Ulysses is my desert island book. I don't think I could ever get tired of reading it. See my Disordered Thoughts).

I haven't read Mary Costello's debut novel Academy Street but from the description at Goodreads, I think it shares the same preoccupations as The River Capture. The central characters are defined by the deaths of their loved ones; love, when it comes, is calamitous; and fate is catastrophic.

The setting, however, is not America, and the central character of The River Capture is not a young women but a solitary Irishman, come home from Dublin to the family farm. Luke O'Brien is a schoolteacher, obsessed by Ulysses, so much so that he identifies with its famous characters Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. He teaches the book to his students, more so, it appears, than is warranted by the curriculum, and the boys indulge him, (as schoolboys are wont to do when a teacher's eccentricities combine to provide amusement and to reduce their workload).

However, it is not these eccentricities which caused his departure from the school, but rather his determination to nurse a much loved aunt through her terminal illness. Luke has an unusual devotion to his family, visiting his elderly Aunt Ellen nearly every day, and still mourning the death of Aunt Josie who was 'a bit slow'. She was thought to have had normal intelligence until one day her sister fell down the well and died, and the shock of that, followed by her father's death a short time later, made her mute for a long time. People in the village say that she was a bit odd, a bit mad but Aunt Ellen demurs. Unaware that Luke himself is not always well, she says that while this whole area has one of the highest rates of mental illness in the whole country, Josie was perfect before the accident. Aunt Ellen idealises the perfection of childhood, and thinks that Una was lucky to die as a child and didn't have to suffer the struggles of growing up and growing old.

Aunt Ellen's bitterness about her own life is held in check until Luke falls in love and hidden events of the past rise to the surface. Ruth comes into his life via a dog that needs a home, and they are instantly attracted to each other. They are able to transcend the issue of Luke's bisexuality, but not Aunt Ellen's hostility. This calamity triggers Luke's latent instability.

From a conventional novel that seems primarily about the cultural predisposition for holding onto long-ago betrayals instead of letting sleeping dogs lie, The River Capture changes direction. (As a river does: a river capture is a geological event that occurs when two rivers merge and both change direction). This allusion is a metaphor for the way Luke's fate is the catalyst for his brain to fall into disarray, while the stylistic shift into interrogative Q&A mode of the Catholic Catechism, as in the Ithaca chapter of Ulysses, signals the persisting power of conservative Irish culture.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/11/09/the-river-capture-by-mary-costello/ ( )