posted on 18 Sep 2023

The River Capture by Mary Costello

Mary Costello’s 2019 novel, The River Capture, arrived to great fanfare – a novel (and moreover a novel by a woman writer) that pays homage to James Joyce while also re-imagining the great man’s legacy in the context of contemporary Ireland. It followed hot on the heels of her award winning first novel and a highly respected volume of short stories and was shortlisted for numerous awards. I was unexpectedly given a copy recently and turned to it with high expectations.

The central character, Luke O’Brien, a man in his mid-thirties, is taking a sabbatical from his teaching job. He is recovering from caring for a favourite aunt (his Aunt Josie) during her final months, doing some desperately needed maintenance work on the large family property, a grand but decaying old house on farm land on the River Sullane in Waterford, and trying to kick-start a book he is writing about James Joyce.

While the first 150-pages or so are sometimes enigmatic – it isn’t always clear who characters are and Luke has an unruly, magpie mind that leaps from arcane subject to arcane subject – this aside we seem firmly in the territory of some of Ireland’s great social realists, such as John McGahern or William Trevor. (In fact, I was strongly reminded of John McGahern’s marvellous last novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun.) 

This long, gradual opening section introduces us to Luke’s family – his dead parents; another favourite aunt, Aunt Ellen, who has returned to Ireland after more than forty years spent in the US and now lives near-by; a shadowy family tragedy that happened decades previously; and family lore lost in the mists of time. Nothing very much happens – shopping for groceries, cooking, reading, the modest work that the estate entails – but what little does is closely observed and scrupulously described. 

I rather enjoyed this part of the book and although I would have welcomed a bit more forward momentum, I would have been happy to read more of it. But then there is a sudden and to my mind entirely unsuccessful shift in tone and technique. We find out that Luke’s Aunt Ellen was once engaged to the father of Luke’s mysterious new lover, Ruth, but was cruelly humiliated prior to the engagement being broken off. Finding this out seems to unhinge Luke and precipitate some kind of breakdown. 

I found this crucial episode unsatisfactory because despite its central importance to the structure of the novel, Aunt Ellen – rather like Ruth and most of the other characters, in fact – has little substance. The characters – in so far as they exist outside of Luke’s own monologues – are only really cyphers; they entirely lack that mysterious spark that enables fictional characters to become what Richard Ford has described as ‘…instruments made of words, dazzled into virtual life…’.

Luke then engages in a long, eloquently vitriolic rant – very Thomas Bernhard in tone – during which he excoriates all those he considers his enemies and persecutors. And then for almost the entirety of the rest of the book Costello adopts a rhetorical question-and-answer structure to explore Luke’s gradual psychic dissolution. If such an approach is especially Joycean then its precise origins and purpose were lost on me and it was about here that I slammed the book shut and gave up.

That The River Capture is a furiously intelligent book cannot be denied, and it is undoubtedly ambitious too. But I didn’t think it ever rose to become more than the sum of its influences. It so desperately wants to be an ambitious modernist masterpiece that it neglects to be an interesting and convincing story that one feels compelled to keep reading because it has people in it whose credible and engaging lives involve us intellectually and emotionally. 

Virtually all reviews of the novel are ecstatic but I’m afraid that it struck me as being an immense labour to remarkably little purpose.

 

Alun Severn

September 2023