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The River Capture
Thirty-four year old Luke O’Brien has left the city to live a quiet, bookish life on the River Sullane in County Waterford. Alone in his big house, he longs for a return to his family’s heyday and turns to books—especially Ulysses—for solace and sublimation. One morning a young woman arrives at his door and enters his life, with profound consequences.
A novel that pays glorious homage to Joyce, The River Capture tells of a man’s phenomenal descent into near madness when love is lost. It is about humanity’s capacity for good and evil and what happens when Nature is thwarted. More than anything, it is a book about the life of the mind and the redemptive powers of art.
221 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2019
About the author
Mary Costello
48 books111 followersMary Costello lives in Dublin. Her collection of short stories, The China Factory, was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award. Academy Street is her first novel.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 98 reviews
September 5, 2020
Mary Costello's short if dense novella, thoroughly drenched in James Joyce, Ulysses, and Leopold Bloom and littered with other literary references, is exquisitely written and original, but it left me admiring it, rather than loving it. 34 year old Luke O'Brien, a Dublin teacher, has been taking a sabbatical, returning home to Waterford and his family home, Ardboe House, amidst the farming community, taking care of his dying Aunt Josie, and failing in his plan to write his own work on Joyce, who he is positively obsessive about. Now living by himself, he wanders the glorious landscape, close to the Sullane river, considering the darkness prevalent in the locale, its history, burdened by the tragedies of his family's past and his life, and his sexual fluidity.
His life begins to take a turn for the better when he meets Ruth when she turns up on his doorstep with a dog, he is very honest about his sexuality. However, he is derailed when his 81 year old Aunt Ellen imparts family secrets that neither he nor Ruth were aware of. Ellen insists that he choose family, and Luke begins to slip into depression and madness, under mental and emotional pressures, as he ruminates over what he should do, the structure of which clearly once again echoes and replicates Ulysses and, Luke seeing himself, like the geography of the river, being overridden by more powerful forces.
With its ambiguous and disturbing ending, I found myself only intermittently interested in what is an ambitious and accomplished novel. However, I can see it appealing to others more, particularly those who love their Joyce. Many thanks to Canongate for an ARC.
His life begins to take a turn for the better when he meets Ruth when she turns up on his doorstep with a dog, he is very honest about his sexuality. However, he is derailed when his 81 year old Aunt Ellen imparts family secrets that neither he nor Ruth were aware of. Ellen insists that he choose family, and Luke begins to slip into depression and madness, under mental and emotional pressures, as he ruminates over what he should do, the structure of which clearly once again echoes and replicates Ulysses and, Luke seeing himself, like the geography of the river, being overridden by more powerful forces.
With its ambiguous and disturbing ending, I found myself only intermittently interested in what is an ambitious and accomplished novel. However, I can see it appealing to others more, particularly those who love their Joyce. Many thanks to Canongate for an ARC.
November 1, 2019
Bad blood will always show itself, it’s the nature of the beast. Nature always wins out in the end.
The protagonist of Mary Costello's River Capture, Luke O'Brien, aged 34, and a INFJ personality type, is currently living, alone, on the family farm Ardboe, his only nearby relative an 81 year old aunt, Ellen, to whom he is very close. His farm is near a bend in the Sullane river in Waterford:
All Waterford lay around him: fertile fields, ancient oak forests, a great river plain, a castle three miles away with other ancestral houses spread out like satellites around it, and, less than a quarter of a mile away as the crow flies, the bend in the Sullane river and on its far bank the town of Clonduff.
He is on a 3 year sabbatical from his job as a teacher in Dublin, with the, unfulfilled, aim of writing a book about Joyce and Ulysses, in particular Leopald Bloom. Or perhaps, in his fantasies, opening a unique private school, The Ulysses Academy for Excellence where all the leads, references, riddles and allusions of the novel are followed and all the texts containing these leads, references, allusions etc are explored - through the fields of literature, mythology, music, maths, science, history, theology, philosophy, art; ethics, aesthetics, astronomy, biology, embryology, physics, psychology, the earth sciences, languages, politics; law etc.
The novel opens: Barefoot, Luke O’Brien descends the stairs of Ardboe House and stands at the window on the return landing, with a clear echo of one of the most famous opening lines in literature: "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed." And indeed before the first brief chapter is over, we've already had nods (and I am sure I missed several more) not only to Joyce, but to Calvino, Borges, Dr Seuss, and, perhaps most pertinently, JM Coetzee and his own fictional novelist Elizabeth Costello:
Luke had been greatly taken by a character in a novel who herself had written a novel called The House on Eccles Street, in which Marion Bloom refuses to have sex with her husband until he works out who he is. Luke would have read this novel, if it had existed.
The opening half of the novel describes Luke's day-to-day life, as he negotiates with the neighbouring farmer who leases his land for his dairy herd, ruminates on Joyce (whose words inhabit his thoughts like scripture) and observes the, beautifully described, countryside. But even in the beauty there is a hint of darkness, such as this passage which gives the novel its title:
Here, at this little peninsula they call the Inch, at the very edge of his land, the Sullane swings suddenly to the south, a ninety degree rotation executed millions of years ago. Before it was named, before this place was touched by humans, the river captured the drainage system of another lower, lesser river and met a strange new tide coming in from the sea. A pirate then, the Sullane, Luke thinks, now, a bully and a thief, usurping the route and riverbed of another. He had never thought of it like that before.
(we later find a paper on the topic on his shelves: The Biological Evidence of River Capture by Douglas Wilson Johnson, Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, Vol. 37, No. 3 (1905), downloaded from https://www.jstor.org/stable/198621)
And Luke reflects on his own history and family tragedies - his father's 12 year-old sister who drowned in a well, an act that upset the mental equilibrium of another of Luke's aunts, then an infant. And in the local town itself, Luke's mind reflects briefly on some very dark episodes, such as a a local factory supervisor who offered jobs to young lads in return for sexual favours, leading one to commit suicide.
There has always been a pall over the town, he thinks, something dark and blighting he cannot put his finger on. Even during the economic boom, the air of depression and neglect never lifted.
When Ruth, a local girl, comes into his lift, some of this darkness seems to be lifting at least from his own life. But then his Aunt Ellen reveals that Ruth's family and his are linked by a unpleasant incident in the past, a secret unknown to both Luke and Ruth, and Ellen asks him to choose between his relationship with her and Ruth. At this point, as his emotions are severely disturbed, the narrative form takes an abrupt and Joycean shift.
As he turns in the avenue, what images, prompted by the licking of hot salty ears, come to mind?
Pillars. Lot's wife. His brain in disarray. His brain on the verge of a cataleptic fit caused by the autoimmune destruction of neurons as he tries to fathom the concepts of good and evil, virtue and vice, the warp and woof of consciousness and the mercurial nature of Man. More pillars. The glorious drive back from Kinsale with Ruth at his side, coming up over the Vee and down into the Sullane valley, with the sun setting and their thoughts coalescing and between them a silent understanding that, having earlier experienced in the act of lovemaking the transmutation of lowly instincts into godly essence and accepting that moment as being so sublimely beautiful it could not be surpassed, death now was the only reply, the fitting end to such ecstasy. Up ahead loomed a large overhead bridge under which stood a gigantic pillar of stone and, as they approached the bridge, he thought he heard a whispered Yes and that in that Yes she was willing him to turn the steering wheel a fraction of a revolution to the left and accelerate towards the pillar, this transporting them to an exquisite bliss never before encountered. Such a desire to die in her company was, however, eclipsed by a greater desire to live in it.
This form of question and answer continues for the rest of the novel, a brief end coda aside, inspired of course by the Ithaca section of Ulysses, the last to be completed, and which begins:
The corresponding section of this book rather cleverly mirrors the original, Luke's physical movements similarly described in forensic detail, his efforts to resolve the situation with Ruth and Ellen interspersed with philosophical musings:
What epiphany does he have concerning water?
That it forbears, is ever patient, ever suffering, ever enduring. Long forgotten by the gods, ever in the service of man. Holy, seminal, giver and sustainer of life, sanitator, hydrator, germinator of life, quencher of thirsts and fires, cleanser of bodies and souls, gladdener of hearts, delighter of eyes. Docile accepter of Fate. Where once it carried memories from the realm of the dead to bubble up in poets, the pure hue of blue now carries human waste to the sewers and moderates nuclear reactors. That, since time immemorial, its collective experiences and memories in all its states (solid, liquid, gas and those derivative thereof) and properties (physical, metaphysical, electrical, chemical, curative), during all its cycles and circumambient journeys, in all causative occasions of joy, beauty, suffering (the glint of salmon in its rapids, the tranquil spring well, the swimmer's graceful stroke, the taking of life), and its presence at all natural, unnatural, scientific and unscientific actions, reactions and occurrences are recorded and imprinted in its DNA. Bruised, battered, debased, weighted, desecrated.
Very impressive - and a book I hope to see featured in prize lists in 2020.
The protagonist of Mary Costello's River Capture, Luke O'Brien, aged 34, and a INFJ personality type, is currently living, alone, on the family farm Ardboe, his only nearby relative an 81 year old aunt, Ellen, to whom he is very close. His farm is near a bend in the Sullane river in Waterford:
All Waterford lay around him: fertile fields, ancient oak forests, a great river plain, a castle three miles away with other ancestral houses spread out like satellites around it, and, less than a quarter of a mile away as the crow flies, the bend in the Sullane river and on its far bank the town of Clonduff.
He is on a 3 year sabbatical from his job as a teacher in Dublin, with the, unfulfilled, aim of writing a book about Joyce and Ulysses, in particular Leopald Bloom. Or perhaps, in his fantasies, opening a unique private school, The Ulysses Academy for Excellence where all the leads, references, riddles and allusions of the novel are followed and all the texts containing these leads, references, allusions etc are explored - through the fields of literature, mythology, music, maths, science, history, theology, philosophy, art; ethics, aesthetics, astronomy, biology, embryology, physics, psychology, the earth sciences, languages, politics; law etc.
The novel opens: Barefoot, Luke O’Brien descends the stairs of Ardboe House and stands at the window on the return landing, with a clear echo of one of the most famous opening lines in literature: "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed." And indeed before the first brief chapter is over, we've already had nods (and I am sure I missed several more) not only to Joyce, but to Calvino, Borges, Dr Seuss, and, perhaps most pertinently, JM Coetzee and his own fictional novelist Elizabeth Costello:
Luke had been greatly taken by a character in a novel who herself had written a novel called The House on Eccles Street, in which Marion Bloom refuses to have sex with her husband until he works out who he is. Luke would have read this novel, if it had existed.
The opening half of the novel describes Luke's day-to-day life, as he negotiates with the neighbouring farmer who leases his land for his dairy herd, ruminates on Joyce (whose words inhabit his thoughts like scripture) and observes the, beautifully described, countryside. But even in the beauty there is a hint of darkness, such as this passage which gives the novel its title:
Here, at this little peninsula they call the Inch, at the very edge of his land, the Sullane swings suddenly to the south, a ninety degree rotation executed millions of years ago. Before it was named, before this place was touched by humans, the river captured the drainage system of another lower, lesser river and met a strange new tide coming in from the sea. A pirate then, the Sullane, Luke thinks, now, a bully and a thief, usurping the route and riverbed of another. He had never thought of it like that before.
(we later find a paper on the topic on his shelves: The Biological Evidence of River Capture by Douglas Wilson Johnson, Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, Vol. 37, No. 3 (1905), downloaded from https://www.jstor.org/stable/198621)
And Luke reflects on his own history and family tragedies - his father's 12 year-old sister who drowned in a well, an act that upset the mental equilibrium of another of Luke's aunts, then an infant. And in the local town itself, Luke's mind reflects briefly on some very dark episodes, such as a a local factory supervisor who offered jobs to young lads in return for sexual favours, leading one to commit suicide.
There has always been a pall over the town, he thinks, something dark and blighting he cannot put his finger on. Even during the economic boom, the air of depression and neglect never lifted.
When Ruth, a local girl, comes into his lift, some of this darkness seems to be lifting at least from his own life. But then his Aunt Ellen reveals that Ruth's family and his are linked by a unpleasant incident in the past, a secret unknown to both Luke and Ruth, and Ellen asks him to choose between his relationship with her and Ruth. At this point, as his emotions are severely disturbed, the narrative form takes an abrupt and Joycean shift.
As he turns in the avenue, what images, prompted by the licking of hot salty ears, come to mind?
Pillars. Lot's wife. His brain in disarray. His brain on the verge of a cataleptic fit caused by the autoimmune destruction of neurons as he tries to fathom the concepts of good and evil, virtue and vice, the warp and woof of consciousness and the mercurial nature of Man. More pillars. The glorious drive back from Kinsale with Ruth at his side, coming up over the Vee and down into the Sullane valley, with the sun setting and their thoughts coalescing and between them a silent understanding that, having earlier experienced in the act of lovemaking the transmutation of lowly instincts into godly essence and accepting that moment as being so sublimely beautiful it could not be surpassed, death now was the only reply, the fitting end to such ecstasy. Up ahead loomed a large overhead bridge under which stood a gigantic pillar of stone and, as they approached the bridge, he thought he heard a whispered Yes and that in that Yes she was willing him to turn the steering wheel a fraction of a revolution to the left and accelerate towards the pillar, this transporting them to an exquisite bliss never before encountered. Such a desire to die in her company was, however, eclipsed by a greater desire to live in it.
This form of question and answer continues for the rest of the novel, a brief end coda aside, inspired of course by the Ithaca section of Ulysses, the last to be completed, and which begins:
What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?Joyce (https://jamesjoyce.ie/on-this-day-25-...) has described this episode in one letter as ‘the ugly duckling’ of Ulysses, ‘and therefore, I suppose, my favourite’ and while writing it described it in another letter as being written ‘in the form of a mathematical catechism’ designed to let the reader know everything in the ‘baldest and coldest way'.
Starting united both at normal walking pace from Beresford place they followed in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and Mountjoy square, west: then, at reduced pace, each bearing left, Gardiner's place by an inadvertence as far as the farther corner of Temple street, north: then, at reduced pace with interruptions of halt, bearing right, Temple street, north, as far as Hardwicke place. Approaching, disparate, at relaxed walking pace they crossed both the circus before George's church diametrically, the chord in any circle being less than the arc which it subtends.
The corresponding section of this book rather cleverly mirrors the original, Luke's physical movements similarly described in forensic detail, his efforts to resolve the situation with Ruth and Ellen interspersed with philosophical musings:
What epiphany does he have concerning water?
That it forbears, is ever patient, ever suffering, ever enduring. Long forgotten by the gods, ever in the service of man. Holy, seminal, giver and sustainer of life, sanitator, hydrator, germinator of life, quencher of thirsts and fires, cleanser of bodies and souls, gladdener of hearts, delighter of eyes. Docile accepter of Fate. Where once it carried memories from the realm of the dead to bubble up in poets, the pure hue of blue now carries human waste to the sewers and moderates nuclear reactors. That, since time immemorial, its collective experiences and memories in all its states (solid, liquid, gas and those derivative thereof) and properties (physical, metaphysical, electrical, chemical, curative), during all its cycles and circumambient journeys, in all causative occasions of joy, beauty, suffering (the glint of salmon in its rapids, the tranquil spring well, the swimmer's graceful stroke, the taking of life), and its presence at all natural, unnatural, scientific and unscientific actions, reactions and occurrences are recorded and imprinted in its DNA. Bruised, battered, debased, weighted, desecrated.
Very impressive - and a book I hope to see featured in prize lists in 2020.
September 16, 2019
Reading this book was a journey of curiosity. Without a doubt, it is unlike anything I have read before. This merits the writer's skills and talents and, whilst I was not blown away by the plot, I was astounded by the techniques of the writer's craft.
Following the protagonist, Luke, readers gain a detailed insight into his personality and interpretation of the world around him. Luke's passion for James Joyce influences the manner in which he behaves towards others, particularly when he meets Ruth. I found his interactions with Ruth and also the revelations of Ellen's history the most fascinating; for the rest of the novel it felt like I was reading an encyclopaedia of sorts.
This was a tricky book to absorb myself into. To be honest, I was so curious just from reading the blurb, that I did not know what to expect. There is a lot of inner discussions and reflections as Luke "consumes" the world around him and I believe this is what made the novel so challenging for myself.
The second half of the novel is technically rather fascinating. Instead of a traditional narrative, we are presented with questions on different "episodes", exploring how Luke responds. I guess you could consider it as a third person, abstract interview. It worked really well and made the novel more interesting as a result. In this manner, this technique symbolises the change the Luke himself is experiencing, akin to a "river capture". Costello surprised me with this section of the book: it was an unexpected narrative and I certainly found myself reading it differently.
The title of the novel also piqued my curiosity and I was not going to research it until I had finished. Costello writes, towards the closing of the story that 'When a river erodes the land and acquires the flow from another river or drainage system, usually below it, the first river is said to have captured the second in an act of piracy'. I'm sure any geographers out there may have already knew this, but it was a new fact for me! For certain, this diversion and change in direction reflects how drastically Luke feels his life changes upon meeting Ruth.
The Irish setting is delightful, although this does not feature prominently in the narrative. Luke appears to be someone who needs a decent friend - beyond his aunt and his pets. A complex character, I could easily picture his isolated and thoughtful persona, particularly seated in his large, empty house.
This is a curious, abstract narrative. It is not full of action but more of meandering thoughts and interpretations. It is certainly different to many of the books I have read recently and whilst I was not fully appreciative of Costello's story, can truly see a unique and talented writer in her.
With thanks to Canongate for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Following the protagonist, Luke, readers gain a detailed insight into his personality and interpretation of the world around him. Luke's passion for James Joyce influences the manner in which he behaves towards others, particularly when he meets Ruth. I found his interactions with Ruth and also the revelations of Ellen's history the most fascinating; for the rest of the novel it felt like I was reading an encyclopaedia of sorts.
This was a tricky book to absorb myself into. To be honest, I was so curious just from reading the blurb, that I did not know what to expect. There is a lot of inner discussions and reflections as Luke "consumes" the world around him and I believe this is what made the novel so challenging for myself.
The second half of the novel is technically rather fascinating. Instead of a traditional narrative, we are presented with questions on different "episodes", exploring how Luke responds. I guess you could consider it as a third person, abstract interview. It worked really well and made the novel more interesting as a result. In this manner, this technique symbolises the change the Luke himself is experiencing, akin to a "river capture". Costello surprised me with this section of the book: it was an unexpected narrative and I certainly found myself reading it differently.
The title of the novel also piqued my curiosity and I was not going to research it until I had finished. Costello writes, towards the closing of the story that 'When a river erodes the land and acquires the flow from another river or drainage system, usually below it, the first river is said to have captured the second in an act of piracy'. I'm sure any geographers out there may have already knew this, but it was a new fact for me! For certain, this diversion and change in direction reflects how drastically Luke feels his life changes upon meeting Ruth.
The Irish setting is delightful, although this does not feature prominently in the narrative. Luke appears to be someone who needs a decent friend - beyond his aunt and his pets. A complex character, I could easily picture his isolated and thoughtful persona, particularly seated in his large, empty house.
This is a curious, abstract narrative. It is not full of action but more of meandering thoughts and interpretations. It is certainly different to many of the books I have read recently and whilst I was not fully appreciative of Costello's story, can truly see a unique and talented writer in her.
With thanks to Canongate for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
November 5, 2019
See Paul's review here (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) which captures much (but by no means all of this novel's complexity.
My own thoughts in addition:
The second chapter of the book starts with the ringing of the Angelus bell which inevitably reminded me of the Goldsmith Prize winning “Solar Bones” and in turn prompted memories of a review I read in the Irish Times by the author Colin Barrett. That review, which has stayed with me, says
“Haunting the last hundred years or so of Irish prose – haunting it so pervasively it is as if the pair only died yesterday – are the unbanishable revenants of Joyce and Beckett, virtuoso re-envisagers of the sentence, who between them offer a template for practically every structural and technical variation of the line available in the modernist repertoire ..... Ulysses’ streams-of-consciousness and the baubling polygaloot serpentimes of Finnegans Wake. Irish writers have always been the deepestly embedded double agents in the anglophone tradition, utilising their consummate fluency to irreparably subvert and overthrow the established capacities and defined limits of what is ever more notionally thought of as the “English sentence”
And for me that captures both what is great and also challenging around the novel.
Like so much Irish literature it is experimental, clever and erudite but at the same time beautifully, even poetically written.
A book which can move seamlessly from examination of complex physics through microbiology via a timeless evocation of a pastoral scene, while at the same time bringing in references to (just to name a view) Dr Seuss, Marilynn Robinson, Olga Tolcacuk (rather deliciously given the timing of the book’s publication named only as an author whose name the narrator has forgotten, but who he is reminded of when thinking of a Noble Prize winning author – who I think may well be Olga’s compatriot), Margaret Atwood, J.M. Coetzee together with less deliberate links to some of the more striking novels of the last year (Ducks, Newburyport, Lucia, The Overstory) - is a novel that can only provoke wonder and admiration at the author’s literary prowess and sheer ambition.
And yet at the same time - this is a novel completely taken over by Ulysses and Joyce - a feeling I sometimes have that Irish literature has not been able to escape, or perhaps even wanted to escape from his influence, an influence that is I think a little too explicit from the opening sentence (which even I as a Joyce amateur recognised immediately as taken from the opening of the novel) to the rather proportionately too dominant Ithaca section, to the closing switch to a first person Molly Bloom like monologue – all the time threaded through with explicit references.
Perhaps we should more think of The Joycean capture of Irish literature: When a book erodes the literary landscape and acquires the flow from all other types – the natural course of literary development is altered.
My own thoughts in addition:
The second chapter of the book starts with the ringing of the Angelus bell which inevitably reminded me of the Goldsmith Prize winning “Solar Bones” and in turn prompted memories of a review I read in the Irish Times by the author Colin Barrett. That review, which has stayed with me, says
“Haunting the last hundred years or so of Irish prose – haunting it so pervasively it is as if the pair only died yesterday – are the unbanishable revenants of Joyce and Beckett, virtuoso re-envisagers of the sentence, who between them offer a template for practically every structural and technical variation of the line available in the modernist repertoire ..... Ulysses’ streams-of-consciousness and the baubling polygaloot serpentimes of Finnegans Wake. Irish writers have always been the deepestly embedded double agents in the anglophone tradition, utilising their consummate fluency to irreparably subvert and overthrow the established capacities and defined limits of what is ever more notionally thought of as the “English sentence”
And for me that captures both what is great and also challenging around the novel.
Like so much Irish literature it is experimental, clever and erudite but at the same time beautifully, even poetically written.
A book which can move seamlessly from examination of complex physics through microbiology via a timeless evocation of a pastoral scene, while at the same time bringing in references to (just to name a view) Dr Seuss, Marilynn Robinson, Olga Tolcacuk (rather deliciously given the timing of the book’s publication named only as an author whose name the narrator has forgotten, but who he is reminded of when thinking of a Noble Prize winning author – who I think may well be Olga’s compatriot), Margaret Atwood, J.M. Coetzee together with less deliberate links to some of the more striking novels of the last year (Ducks, Newburyport, Lucia, The Overstory) - is a novel that can only provoke wonder and admiration at the author’s literary prowess and sheer ambition.
And yet at the same time - this is a novel completely taken over by Ulysses and Joyce - a feeling I sometimes have that Irish literature has not been able to escape, or perhaps even wanted to escape from his influence, an influence that is I think a little too explicit from the opening sentence (which even I as a Joyce amateur recognised immediately as taken from the opening of the novel) to the rather proportionately too dominant Ithaca section, to the closing switch to a first person Molly Bloom like monologue – all the time threaded through with explicit references.
Perhaps we should more think of The Joycean capture of Irish literature: When a book erodes the literary landscape and acquires the flow from all other types – the natural course of literary development is altered.
July 7, 2021
Another find in my local library, this book was talked about as a contender for the 2019 Booker, and has been on my radar ever since.
The central character Luke O'Brien has inherited a large house in west Waterford, on the bend of the Sullane river. This river is fictional, but the geographical descriptions suggest that the Blackwater is the model, and Clonduff, the town on the far bank, appears to be based on Cappoquin.
Luke has worked as an English literature lecturer in Dublin, where his specialism is James Joyce and Ulysses in particular, and there is a lot of discussion of Ulysses and its inspirations in the book. He has returned to the family house, initially to care for a dying aunt, and then because of mental issues. The plot such as it is driven by a love story , but much of the book is more meditative, and much of the second half is one big chapter in which each paragraph is a response to a question.
An impressive book, and a fine tribute to Joyce.
The central character Luke O'Brien has inherited a large house in west Waterford, on the bend of the Sullane river. This river is fictional, but the geographical descriptions suggest that the Blackwater is the model, and Clonduff, the town on the far bank, appears to be based on Cappoquin.
Luke has worked as an English literature lecturer in Dublin, where his specialism is James Joyce and Ulysses in particular, and there is a lot of discussion of Ulysses and its inspirations in the book. He has returned to the family house, initially to care for a dying aunt, and then because of mental issues. The plot such as it is driven by a love story , but much of the book is more meditative, and much of the second half is one big chapter in which each paragraph is a response to a question.
An impressive book, and a fine tribute to Joyce.
April 21, 2020
I have been meaning to read Ulysses for many years. I knew that this book on my TBR pile was about a Joyce scholar and this was the prod I need to finally knuckle down to Joyce’s book: I figured I knew I wanted to read it and it would probably help me in reading this book. I was right about both of those things.
Luke O’Brien is a Joyce scholar whose life has stalled. He is on a long sabbatical away from his teaching job. His plans to use this time to write a book about Ulysses have come to nothing (he has several other plans, too, and none are bearing fruit). His love life has stalled: he doesn’t like to label things, but it started with heterosexual experiences, moved to homosexual for a while and then back to heterosexual at which point it sort of petered out.
It is not only Luke who is a Joyce scholar. The narrative of the novel is packed with references to Ulysses (it opens with someone coming downstairs for a shave, for example). There are multiple other literary references packed into the text, too. Quotes from T S Eliot, W B Yeats, Edgar Allan Poe, mentions of Borges, Calvino, Coetzee, plus many others.
All this literariness is in sharp contrast to the subject matter which, for the first half of the book concerns Luke’s day-to-day activities which, given nearly everything in his life is on hold, aren’t actually all that exciting. The strange thing is, though, that it makes compulsive and very enjoyable reading. We meet other characters as they come into contact with Luke. We learn, as he remembers things, about his family history and some of the tragedies that have struck. It’s hard not to notice that almost everyone Luke interacts with is female.
One particular female interaction is with Ruth who enters his life part way through the book and catalyses the dramatic peak of the novel which occurs about halfway through. At this point the book takes a completely different tack. A very Joycean tack. The second half of the book takes the introspective question and answer format of the Ithaca episode of Ulysses and uses it to show us Luke processing the dramatic event that has unfolded. It feels almost like two different books but not in a bad way. The book sticks with this Ithaca format for almost the entire second half: I loved the effect and the impact when it started but, for me, it went on for too long and somewhat lessened the impact of the book.
This is a minor quibble though in what is a fascinating and clever book. Those who know Joyce and Ulysses better than I do will have a wonderful time uncovering the references. The book talks several times about the interconnectedness of things (All the lives parallel to his own, all the moments in which different things are simultaneously happening. Horizontal time. and "…the water didn’t come over the land, it came up from underground, from somewhere around the house. Maybe from the well. I don’t know how it happened. There must be some underground connection.") and there is a lot of underground connectivity going on through the novel. It is very impressive.
Luke O’Brien is a Joyce scholar whose life has stalled. He is on a long sabbatical away from his teaching job. His plans to use this time to write a book about Ulysses have come to nothing (he has several other plans, too, and none are bearing fruit). His love life has stalled: he doesn’t like to label things, but it started with heterosexual experiences, moved to homosexual for a while and then back to heterosexual at which point it sort of petered out.
It is not only Luke who is a Joyce scholar. The narrative of the novel is packed with references to Ulysses (it opens with someone coming downstairs for a shave, for example). There are multiple other literary references packed into the text, too. Quotes from T S Eliot, W B Yeats, Edgar Allan Poe, mentions of Borges, Calvino, Coetzee, plus many others.
All this literariness is in sharp contrast to the subject matter which, for the first half of the book concerns Luke’s day-to-day activities which, given nearly everything in his life is on hold, aren’t actually all that exciting. The strange thing is, though, that it makes compulsive and very enjoyable reading. We meet other characters as they come into contact with Luke. We learn, as he remembers things, about his family history and some of the tragedies that have struck. It’s hard not to notice that almost everyone Luke interacts with is female.
One particular female interaction is with Ruth who enters his life part way through the book and catalyses the dramatic peak of the novel which occurs about halfway through. At this point the book takes a completely different tack. A very Joycean tack. The second half of the book takes the introspective question and answer format of the Ithaca episode of Ulysses and uses it to show us Luke processing the dramatic event that has unfolded. It feels almost like two different books but not in a bad way. The book sticks with this Ithaca format for almost the entire second half: I loved the effect and the impact when it started but, for me, it went on for too long and somewhat lessened the impact of the book.
This is a minor quibble though in what is a fascinating and clever book. Those who know Joyce and Ulysses better than I do will have a wonderful time uncovering the references. The book talks several times about the interconnectedness of things (All the lives parallel to his own, all the moments in which different things are simultaneously happening. Horizontal time. and "…the water didn’t come over the land, it came up from underground, from somewhere around the house. Maybe from the well. I don’t know how it happened. There must be some underground connection.") and there is a lot of underground connectivity going on through the novel. It is very impressive.
Did Not Finish
March 15, 2021I gave this an honest try but at the 40% mark have set it down permanently. I was quite drawn to the main character—dreamy, literary Luke—and enjoyed the setting of the quiet family farm by the river, but I haven’t read Joyce’s Ulysses and that was all he really cared about, other than a certain young woman and an elderly aunt. His obsession with Bloom and all things Joycean, and his looong, warm, caring, sensitive, and oh-so-earnest conversations with the two women were all that was going on, which made for dreary reading indeed.
February 21, 2020
Synopsis
A book for James Joyce aficionados. References to Ulysses crop up throughout The River Capture. Stylistically it’s a homage to Ulysses, and in Luke O'Brien we have a Joycean teacher (“Joyceanilia“) who models himself on Leopold Bloom.
It’s also a book about nature (hence the book’s title) and Luke’s identification with the land that surrounds him is wishful and nostalgic. The family home is Ardboe House, in the middle of long standing farming communities.
Luke is a most intriguing character, an who wouldn’t warm to somebody who lives for “the Ranking of Kindness above all other virtues” ?(203)
It’s a book with three constituent parts.
• Luke’s family lineage, and especially the contrasting lives of aunts, Ellen and Josie.
• The land and the magical and mythical qualities of water. (Madsara Emotu is referenced).
Richard Powers’s the Overstory ascribes communication skills to trees. Costello does too, including a German forester describing the arborial world.
• Ruth Mulvey. A potentially beautiful love story, complete with correspondence ‘Love is unhappy when love is away’
And each element is lovely and original in its own way.
The book’s end raises more questions than it provides answers, and that’s welcome.
Highlights
How do we choose between friends, lovers, and family? Would we all choose 12,000 days, a lifetime, over 130 heady hours of excitement. Luke has a choice to make, when torn between two people. (159)
Historical & Literary
* References to James Joyce's Ulysses are scattered through the book.
Ithaca (Episode 17) is narrated in the third person through a set of 309 questions with accompanying detailed and answers. A similarly extensive list of questions, addressed to himself, complete the final half of the book. It may sound disjointed, but it works very well.
* A list of Luke’s books in answer to a self addressed question: two that make a lasting impression on Luke are :Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee, Atomised by Michel Houllebecq (191)
Questions /Quotations
• Lily, the cat goes missing from vets?? I would not be as laissez faire if a vet lost my cat!!
• Sister Lucy, and her family are so lightly touched upon that they hint at a story of their own.
Author background & Reviews
Costello was a teacher (like Luke) before giving up to write full time. Academy Street , which won the Irish Book of the Year award in 2014. She is surprisingly little known given such literary recognition. She lives in Dublin and this might explain the love of Joyce and the Dublin references.
Recommend
Yes, A superb book and one that I believe would grace the Women’s Prize 2020 list.
A book for James Joyce aficionados. References to Ulysses crop up throughout The River Capture. Stylistically it’s a homage to Ulysses, and in Luke O'Brien we have a Joycean teacher (“Joyceanilia“) who models himself on Leopold Bloom.
It’s also a book about nature (hence the book’s title) and Luke’s identification with the land that surrounds him is wishful and nostalgic. The family home is Ardboe House, in the middle of long standing farming communities.
Luke is a most intriguing character, an who wouldn’t warm to somebody who lives for “the Ranking of Kindness above all other virtues” ?(203)
It’s a book with three constituent parts.
• Luke’s family lineage, and especially the contrasting lives of aunts, Ellen and Josie.
• The land and the magical and mythical qualities of water. (Madsara Emotu is referenced).
Richard Powers’s the Overstory ascribes communication skills to trees. Costello does too, including a German forester describing the arborial world.
• Ruth Mulvey. A potentially beautiful love story, complete with correspondence ‘Love is unhappy when love is away’
And each element is lovely and original in its own way.
The book’s end raises more questions than it provides answers, and that’s welcome.
Highlights
How do we choose between friends, lovers, and family? Would we all choose 12,000 days, a lifetime, over 130 heady hours of excitement. Luke has a choice to make, when torn between two people. (159)
Historical & Literary
* References to James Joyce's Ulysses are scattered through the book.
Ithaca (Episode 17) is narrated in the third person through a set of 309 questions with accompanying detailed and answers. A similarly extensive list of questions, addressed to himself, complete the final half of the book. It may sound disjointed, but it works very well.
* A list of Luke’s books in answer to a self addressed question: two that make a lasting impression on Luke are :Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee, Atomised by Michel Houllebecq (191)
Questions /Quotations
• Lily, the cat goes missing from vets?? I would not be as laissez faire if a vet lost my cat!!
• Sister Lucy, and her family are so lightly touched upon that they hint at a story of their own.
Author background & Reviews
Costello was a teacher (like Luke) before giving up to write full time. Academy Street , which won the Irish Book of the Year award in 2014. She is surprisingly little known given such literary recognition. She lives in Dublin and this might explain the love of Joyce and the Dublin references.
Recommend
Yes, A superb book and one that I believe would grace the Women’s Prize 2020 list.
September 29, 2019
I have never read anything by James Joyce, let alone ‘Ulysses’, but now I could almost believe I have, this book is so steeped in references to Joyce’s life and events in his characters’ lives. I loved all that and the way Luke finds his life reflected in Joyce’s writing. I spent almost more time researching Joyce and Leopold Bloom than I did reading the pages of this novel. Job done, Ms Costello.
I found the strand featuring Luke, Ruth and Ellen uncomfortable. I am not sure what I have taken away from reading this or what might have been intended for the reader to conclude.
Depressing too, though, were the references to animal mistreatment. I can see the point of them, given Joyce’s vegetarianism, but I skipped a lot of pages.
All in all, a book I liked and disliked in equal measure. Not one I’ll forget quickly.
With thanks to Canongate via NetGalley for the opportunity to read an ARC.
I found the strand featuring Luke, Ruth and Ellen uncomfortable. I am not sure what I have taken away from reading this or what might have been intended for the reader to conclude.
Depressing too, though, were the references to animal mistreatment. I can see the point of them, given Joyce’s vegetarianism, but I skipped a lot of pages.
All in all, a book I liked and disliked in equal measure. Not one I’ll forget quickly.
With thanks to Canongate via NetGalley for the opportunity to read an ARC.
March 31, 2022
After reading Mary Costello's short stories The China Factory earlier this month I was looking forward to one of her novels and O chose to start with The River Capture, in part due to its connection to James Joyce, since I plan to read Nora: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce next.
I realised that I was likely not going to pick up any references to Ulysses as I haven't read it, so I looked up its description, structure and characters, just so I wasn't completely ignorant of it.
The first two thirds of the novel is the story of Luke, a young man who has taken a year out from his teaching job in Dublin and come back to spend time in the house he inherited from his parents. He is in a kind of manic depression, he was close to an Aunt that passed away and there is another Aunt Ellen, who he visits regularly and is there for when needed.
We know that he was in a relationship in the past and that possibly his current situation is due in part to that loss as well.
One morning a young woman arrives at his doorstep with a request, it is the beginning of a new friendship and he begins to anticipate her visits and look forward to things.
Unbeknown to the two young people, there is some family history.
At the point that this history becomes known, the narrative changes completely and this is where the Ulysses reference makes a significant impact on the narrative. The plot is arrested, and what follows are questions or instructions and their answers about thoughts, memories, images, aspects of this story or about the text of Ulysses.
Some of these passages relate to the story we are reading and others relate to random other things. Unfortunately for me, this change in structure so late in the storytelling was annoying and I couldn't appreciate it and I found myself almost skipping some passages because I wasn't interested in those subjects outside the story line.
The River Capture is a metaphor for the way one river captures or swallows another, a natural phenomenon of geography and this is what happens in the novel, one part of the narrative captures the other, taking our attention away from the sad reality of what is occurring.
I realised that I was likely not going to pick up any references to Ulysses as I haven't read it, so I looked up its description, structure and characters, just so I wasn't completely ignorant of it.
The first two thirds of the novel is the story of Luke, a young man who has taken a year out from his teaching job in Dublin and come back to spend time in the house he inherited from his parents. He is in a kind of manic depression, he was close to an Aunt that passed away and there is another Aunt Ellen, who he visits regularly and is there for when needed.
We know that he was in a relationship in the past and that possibly his current situation is due in part to that loss as well.
One morning a young woman arrives at his doorstep with a request, it is the beginning of a new friendship and he begins to anticipate her visits and look forward to things.
Unbeknown to the two young people, there is some family history.
At the point that this history becomes known, the narrative changes completely and this is where the Ulysses reference makes a significant impact on the narrative. The plot is arrested, and what follows are questions or instructions and their answers about thoughts, memories, images, aspects of this story or about the text of Ulysses.
Some of these passages relate to the story we are reading and others relate to random other things. Unfortunately for me, this change in structure so late in the storytelling was annoying and I couldn't appreciate it and I found myself almost skipping some passages because I wasn't interested in those subjects outside the story line.
The River Capture is a metaphor for the way one river captures or swallows another, a natural phenomenon of geography and this is what happens in the novel, one part of the narrative captures the other, taking our attention away from the sad reality of what is occurring.
December 18, 2019
Luke O’Brien has taken a long sabbatical from his teaching job in Dublin and is back living at the family farm beside the river in Waterford. Though only in his mid-thirties, he seems like a man of sorrows, often dwelling on the loss of parents, aunts and romantic relationships with both men and women. He takes quiet pleasure in food, the company of pets, and books, including his extensive collection on James Joyce, about whom he’d like to write a tome of his own. The novel’s very gentle crisis comes when Luke falls for Ruth and it emerges that her late father ruined his beloved Aunt Ellen’s reputation.
At this point a troubled Luke is driven into 100+ pages of sinuous contemplation, a bravura section of short fragments headed by questions. Rather like a catechism, it’s a playful way of organizing his thoughts and likely more than a little Joycean in approach – I’ve read Portrait of the Artist and Dubliners but not Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, so I feel less than able to comment on the literary ventriloquism, but I found this a pleasingly over-the-top stream-of-consciousness that ranges from the profound (“What fear suddenly assails him? The arrival of the noonday demon”) to the scatological (“At what point does he urinate? At approximately three-quarters of the way up the avenue”).
While this doesn’t quite match Costello’s near-perfect novella, Academy Street, it’s an impressive experiment in voice and style, and the treatment of Luke’s bisexuality struck me as sensitive – an apt metaphorical manifestation of the novel’s focus on fluidity.
Why Joyce? “integrity … commitment to the quotidian … refusal to take conventions for granted”
Also recommended: The Sixteenth of June by Maya Lang
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
At this point a troubled Luke is driven into 100+ pages of sinuous contemplation, a bravura section of short fragments headed by questions. Rather like a catechism, it’s a playful way of organizing his thoughts and likely more than a little Joycean in approach – I’ve read Portrait of the Artist and Dubliners but not Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, so I feel less than able to comment on the literary ventriloquism, but I found this a pleasingly over-the-top stream-of-consciousness that ranges from the profound (“What fear suddenly assails him? The arrival of the noonday demon”) to the scatological (“At what point does he urinate? At approximately three-quarters of the way up the avenue”).
While this doesn’t quite match Costello’s near-perfect novella, Academy Street, it’s an impressive experiment in voice and style, and the treatment of Luke’s bisexuality struck me as sensitive – an apt metaphorical manifestation of the novel’s focus on fluidity.
Why Joyce? “integrity … commitment to the quotidian … refusal to take conventions for granted”
Also recommended: The Sixteenth of June by Maya Lang
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
October 17, 2019
I started out really liking this book. Mary Costello captures the essence of rural Ireland, particularly the traits and interactions of the inhabitants of the village/town in which the novel is set. The early story rolls out well and you are drawn to and interested in the main characters. Costello is a quality author.
However the development of the plot, for me, falls away after the discovery of how the hero's aunt is connected to the father of the girl, whom he believes he has fallen in love with. The story begins to lose credibility at this point. For the final third of the book, the hero meanders along some fairly tenuous philosophical pathways. We have a melange of the hero's musings on Joyce, on his own sexual orientation and on the power of the local river/area and their influence on him and his family. Unfortunately the result is a lack of coherence and a failure to adequately support the storyline.
Pity - I really liked 'Academy Street'.
However the development of the plot, for me, falls away after the discovery of how the hero's aunt is connected to the father of the girl, whom he believes he has fallen in love with. The story begins to lose credibility at this point. For the final third of the book, the hero meanders along some fairly tenuous philosophical pathways. We have a melange of the hero's musings on Joyce, on his own sexual orientation and on the power of the local river/area and their influence on him and his family. Unfortunately the result is a lack of coherence and a failure to adequately support the storyline.
Pity - I really liked 'Academy Street'.
September 6, 2019
Luke leaves behind a Dublin teaching post and a failed relationship, takes a sabbatical and returns to his family farm close to the River Sullane.
His solitary life now contrasts with the energy of a childhood surrounded by extended family and he dwells on his dead and distant relations, all departed except one maiden aunt who lives nearby.
His attempts to write about Joyce and his works, an obsession, have proved futile and his income need to be maintained. Just then Ruth enters Luke’s life but as their relationship intensifies, unexpected difficulties surface too.
A River Capture is a glorious and engaging read. A river capture it appears, is when two rivers meet, one can sometimes be diverted to flow into the other riverbed, much as Luke feels the direction of his life is influenced by events outside his control. Joyce and his characters are at the core of this book, as Luke compares himself to them as if they are real- and they do feel thoroughly real to him. This is a novel about love, whether familial loyalty ranks higher than romantic love and concluding on an uncertain and disquieting note.
With thanks to Netgalley and Canongate for the opportunity to read it
His solitary life now contrasts with the energy of a childhood surrounded by extended family and he dwells on his dead and distant relations, all departed except one maiden aunt who lives nearby.
His attempts to write about Joyce and his works, an obsession, have proved futile and his income need to be maintained. Just then Ruth enters Luke’s life but as their relationship intensifies, unexpected difficulties surface too.
A River Capture is a glorious and engaging read. A river capture it appears, is when two rivers meet, one can sometimes be diverted to flow into the other riverbed, much as Luke feels the direction of his life is influenced by events outside his control. Joyce and his characters are at the core of this book, as Luke compares himself to them as if they are real- and they do feel thoroughly real to him. This is a novel about love, whether familial loyalty ranks higher than romantic love and concluding on an uncertain and disquieting note.
With thanks to Netgalley and Canongate for the opportunity to read it
January 1, 2020
I realised about 50 pages in, when I went to check on the Joyce-had-syphilis motif, that I no longer have my copy of Ellman's James Joyce. I'll have to get another copy now, and re-read Ulysses too (it must be... nearly 20 years since the last full read), and whilst we're at it, I'm even wondering if this will be the year to, at last, read Finnegans Wake cover-to-cover... Because the River Capture is a book that makes this Joyce fan remember the way his perception of life and literature was irrevocably changed when I read Ulysses the first time, (which was, oh blimey, forty years ago).
It's more than a Joyce tribute act, much more too than a story of family, love and shenanigans down the generations in rural Ireland. It's modelled on Ulysses, and there are numberless echoes - at least one I spotted to The Dead, and the horse-piss from A Portrait, probably lots, lots more I missed. Difficult to review without Spoilers: the action pivots shockingly in the middle, and then there's a brilliantly funny Ithaca episode, as long as the original one. It's a rare novel where one retains empathy with a protagonist who urinates in the sink whilst the dishes are still in it.
It's more than a Joyce tribute act, much more too than a story of family, love and shenanigans down the generations in rural Ireland. It's modelled on Ulysses, and there are numberless echoes - at least one I spotted to The Dead, and the horse-piss from A Portrait, probably lots, lots more I missed. Difficult to review without Spoilers: the action pivots shockingly in the middle, and then there's a brilliantly funny Ithaca episode, as long as the original one. It's a rare novel where one retains empathy with a protagonist who urinates in the sink whilst the dishes are still in it.
September 2, 2020
Even after so long reading and reviewing I still feel randomly guilty when for whatever reason I don't connect with the work of an obviously talented writer. Such was the case with The River Capture, a beautifully written novel that, well, bored me.
It's probably helpful to point out that I have the same problem with Donnna Tartt so if you like those you'll probably love this. It is the kind of literary story where an awful lot of nothing happens before something happens...and whilst I'm not adverse to a slow burner, have in fact loved a fair few that others have considered too slow, it is highly subjective but this wasnt for me.
Joyce fans will devour it. But my interest in a man wandering around looking at cows before starting a very very slow descent into some kind of madness lasted only about 25% into this...when he was still doing an awful lot of nothing. So there it is. Admittedly I skim read the rest but in the end I simply didn't like it.
Yes still feeling randomly guilty.
It's probably helpful to point out that I have the same problem with Donnna Tartt so if you like those you'll probably love this. It is the kind of literary story where an awful lot of nothing happens before something happens...and whilst I'm not adverse to a slow burner, have in fact loved a fair few that others have considered too slow, it is highly subjective but this wasnt for me.
Joyce fans will devour it. But my interest in a man wandering around looking at cows before starting a very very slow descent into some kind of madness lasted only about 25% into this...when he was still doing an awful lot of nothing. So there it is. Admittedly I skim read the rest but in the end I simply didn't like it.
Yes still feeling randomly guilty.
June 17, 2022
This is the story of a want-to-be Joyce scholar who leaves his teaching job in Dublin to move back to his family's large country home. His aunt, who worked forty years in America, has moved back after retirement but lives up the hill in a small cottage.
Luke struggles with many things in life. He is only in his mid-30's and left behind a long term relationship with a woman in Dublin. He is also bisexual. He wants to write a book about Joyce, but realizes so much has already been written. He meets a women whose family lives the next valley over, but who herself lives and works in Dublin. This leads to an explosion of family secrets and history being revealed.
The last third of the book is written in Joyce -type prose. I loved it. Even though it was not a hit with everyone in my Irish fiction book club, we had a very dynamic discussion.
Luke struggles with many things in life. He is only in his mid-30's and left behind a long term relationship with a woman in Dublin. He is also bisexual. He wants to write a book about Joyce, but realizes so much has already been written. He meets a women whose family lives the next valley over, but who herself lives and works in Dublin. This leads to an explosion of family secrets and history being revealed.
The last third of the book is written in Joyce -type prose. I loved it. Even though it was not a hit with everyone in my Irish fiction book club, we had a very dynamic discussion.
January 17, 2021
This novel focuses on the day to day life of a man in his early thirties temporarily living on his family farm in rural Waterford as he tries to write a book about James Joyce. There are moments in this novel that really ring true, like the scenes between the protagonist and his 81 year old aunt, and when an unknown car arrives outside his house. Unfortunately there is far more time spent contemplating Joyce and Leopold Bloom and how much they mean to him. I've never read Ulysses so maybe it might be more interesting if I had, but I'm not sure. To me it seemed indulgent and tedious.
December 15, 2019
I received a free digital copy of this book from the publishers/author via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
A beautiful story about a man living in his family home, and wondering where to go next while appreciating the beauty and peace of the nature around him.
I really enjoyed this story which once again proved to me that Mary Costello is an absolute expert at writing wonderful things about ordinary people. Luke isn't anyone special - just a former teacher with a passion for James Joyce, and someone who is loving and there for people who need him (his sick aunt, his elderly aunt and his mother). I enjoyed just reading Luke's thoughts about different things and the beginnings of his relationship with Ruth.
One of the strongest topics in this book is definitely Luke's exploration into his own sexuality and how he realised in his late 20s that he is also attracted to men, and would identify more so as bisexual (though his thoughts around gender and sexuality are extremely fluid). His conversations with Ruth about his sexuality and how he wasn't going to apologise for it was SO important and I'm really glad to see this in a book. Particularly an Irish book where some of the readers could possibly be older Irish people, from conservative, religious backgrounds, and who may have never been privy to such conversations before and could open their eyes and bring more understanding.
The last part of this book was a bit of a disaster for me as I feel Luke's thoughts went extremely manic, and I didn't enjoy reading that at all. It went on for a bit too long and it was just tangent after tangent.
I definitely do enjoy Mary Costello's writing though and I'm looking forward to reading more of her work.
A beautiful story about a man living in his family home, and wondering where to go next while appreciating the beauty and peace of the nature around him.
I really enjoyed this story which once again proved to me that Mary Costello is an absolute expert at writing wonderful things about ordinary people. Luke isn't anyone special - just a former teacher with a passion for James Joyce, and someone who is loving and there for people who need him (his sick aunt, his elderly aunt and his mother). I enjoyed just reading Luke's thoughts about different things and the beginnings of his relationship with Ruth.
One of the strongest topics in this book is definitely Luke's exploration into his own sexuality and how he realised in his late 20s that he is also attracted to men, and would identify more so as bisexual (though his thoughts around gender and sexuality are extremely fluid). His conversations with Ruth about his sexuality and how he wasn't going to apologise for it was SO important and I'm really glad to see this in a book. Particularly an Irish book where some of the readers could possibly be older Irish people, from conservative, religious backgrounds, and who may have never been privy to such conversations before and could open their eyes and bring more understanding.
The last part of this book was a bit of a disaster for me as I feel Luke's thoughts went extremely manic, and I didn't enjoy reading that at all. It went on for a bit too long and it was just tangent after tangent.
I definitely do enjoy Mary Costello's writing though and I'm looking forward to reading more of her work.
September 22, 2020
I think this book would have made more sense to me if I had ever been able to finish Ulysses. Mary Costello's book is so steeped in Ulysses, so inherently tied to it that the author spends some time in the book comparing her protagonist with that of James Joyce's. Towards the end, I just wanted to finish this book, getting very little from the experience of reading it. I loved Academy Street and was looking forward to The River Capture, but I feel it just isn't the book for me.
July 8, 2020
The River Capture – the second novel from the Irish writer Mary Costello – shares something with its predecessor, the deeply affecting Academy Street, a work of intense beauty and sadness. In both novels, the lives of the central characters are dictated by traumatic events – more specifically, deaths in the family and the feckless actions of men. Capture, however, is a more ambitious novel than Academy Street, particularly in terms of style and form. There is a real sense of Costello’s development as a writer here, something that leaves me excited to see what she produces next…
Central to The River Capture is Luke O’Brien, an unmarried teacher in his mid-thirties, currently on an extended sabbatical from his role teaching English at Belvedere College, a secondary school in Dublin. He is back at Ardboe, the sizeable O’Brien estate in Waterford, a farm that has been in the family for several generations.
Having nursed his beloved Aunt Josie through a terminal illness, Luke is now at a bit of a loose end, endlessly dreaming of James Joyce and his masterpiece, Ulysses, about which he is rather obsessed. Alongside caring for Josie, Luke had intended to use his career break to write his own book on Joyce; or even, in his wildest dreams, to establish an Academy of Excellence at Ardboe, where the entire school curriculum would be drawn from the text of Ulysses. However, despite bursts of intensive research, neither of these plans has come to fruition. Instead, Luke spends his days visiting his elderly Aunt Ellen, whom he is very close to. Ellen – whose house is situated nearby – appears to be Luke’s only living relative, his father and mother having died some years earlier.
Alongside Ellen, there is also the business of the farm to deal with, particularly the land which is coveted by a neighbouring farmer, Jim Lynch. Having helped Luke out financially at a time of grief, Lynch is keen to extend his lease on the land by five years, effectively tying Luke to a long-term commitment he is reluctant to make.
This first section of the novel is fluid and beautifully written, weaving together Luke’s current preoccupations with various memories from the past.
Moments like this he longs to be back in Belvedere. That morning walk, pigeons on the footpath, raucous gulls overhead. Buses pulling out from the kerb spluttering exhaust fumes on passing cyclists. All the lives parallel to his own, all the moments in which different things are simultaneously happening. Horizontal time. Thoughts and musings that seem to go on for hours, but take only minutes. No one understands time. Impossible to measure too. If it weren’t for death, we might not count time at all… (p. 11)
To read the rest of my review, please visit:
https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2020...
Central to The River Capture is Luke O’Brien, an unmarried teacher in his mid-thirties, currently on an extended sabbatical from his role teaching English at Belvedere College, a secondary school in Dublin. He is back at Ardboe, the sizeable O’Brien estate in Waterford, a farm that has been in the family for several generations.
Having nursed his beloved Aunt Josie through a terminal illness, Luke is now at a bit of a loose end, endlessly dreaming of James Joyce and his masterpiece, Ulysses, about which he is rather obsessed. Alongside caring for Josie, Luke had intended to use his career break to write his own book on Joyce; or even, in his wildest dreams, to establish an Academy of Excellence at Ardboe, where the entire school curriculum would be drawn from the text of Ulysses. However, despite bursts of intensive research, neither of these plans has come to fruition. Instead, Luke spends his days visiting his elderly Aunt Ellen, whom he is very close to. Ellen – whose house is situated nearby – appears to be Luke’s only living relative, his father and mother having died some years earlier.
Alongside Ellen, there is also the business of the farm to deal with, particularly the land which is coveted by a neighbouring farmer, Jim Lynch. Having helped Luke out financially at a time of grief, Lynch is keen to extend his lease on the land by five years, effectively tying Luke to a long-term commitment he is reluctant to make.
This first section of the novel is fluid and beautifully written, weaving together Luke’s current preoccupations with various memories from the past.
Moments like this he longs to be back in Belvedere. That morning walk, pigeons on the footpath, raucous gulls overhead. Buses pulling out from the kerb spluttering exhaust fumes on passing cyclists. All the lives parallel to his own, all the moments in which different things are simultaneously happening. Horizontal time. Thoughts and musings that seem to go on for hours, but take only minutes. No one understands time. Impossible to measure too. If it weren’t for death, we might not count time at all… (p. 11)
To read the rest of my review, please visit:
https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2020...
November 24, 2019
I find this difficult to rate, much as I found it difficult to decide whether to finish it or not. I did finish it but perhaps more from cussedness than anything else. I loved Academy Street and had looked forward to reading this - perhaps if I had read Ulysses it would have seemed more engaging. I liked the story and the themes that seemed to be emerging, and Costello is a great stylist and clearly very intelligent, interested in and capable of engaging with ideas in fiction. But everything that was good and/or intriguing here appeared to me to be strangled or stifled by the Joycean stuff. Maybe I was meant to realise that if I haven't read Ulysses then this novel isn't for me. But I'm then not sure what the point of publishing such a novel is - surely that is ridiculously niche? I have always thought I'd like to give Ulysses a go, I have a copy waiting to be read, but oddly enough this novel made me feel much less likely to reach for it any time soon. It seems very unlikely that was Costello's intention and probably signals that this book failed me and her. Think 3 stars is wrong! I would still read whatever she does next but possibly on borrowed time.
September 4, 2019
Luke O'Brien has left Dublin to live a quiet life on his family land on the bend of the River Sullane. Alone in his big house, he longs for a return to his family's heyday and turns to books for solace.
When Ruth enters Luke's life he is besotted. However, her introduction to his family does not go as he hoped.
A family man, carrying many crosses upon his shoulders, Luke is torn.
This is a book unlike any I have read before, Luke is completely obsessed with James Joyce and it is almost like an homage to him. It is at times lyrical, at times raw, and at times completely savage in it's prose.
We witness Luke at his most vulnerable, fragile and utterly mad with emotion.
I found it hard to find the words to describe Mary Costelloe's writing, it's truly something else.
When Ruth enters Luke's life he is besotted. However, her introduction to his family does not go as he hoped.
A family man, carrying many crosses upon his shoulders, Luke is torn.
This is a book unlike any I have read before, Luke is completely obsessed with James Joyce and it is almost like an homage to him. It is at times lyrical, at times raw, and at times completely savage in it's prose.
We witness Luke at his most vulnerable, fragile and utterly mad with emotion.
I found it hard to find the words to describe Mary Costelloe's writing, it's truly something else.
February 19, 2020
Luke suffers under the same ailment as Oblomov 160 years ago, and like Oblomov, he solves his problems by retreating into himself.
He has been updated with a fair dose of modernism (he adores James Joyce) and contemporay charm (he is preferring his aunts and cat over over his girlfriend).
My only gripe is that Costello keeps beating Luke chapter to chapter (with changing stylistic weapons), even though he is already dead from the beginning. You don't do that to your characters.
He has been updated with a fair dose of modernism (he adores James Joyce) and contemporay charm (he is preferring his aunts and cat over over his girlfriend).
My only gripe is that Costello keeps beating Luke chapter to chapter (with changing stylistic weapons), even though he is already dead from the beginning. You don't do that to your characters.
February 1, 2020
Not my type of book or writing. It could be that I have not read enough Joyce to truly appreciate the book. There were some good bits but I spent most of the last 100 pages willing him to go mad faster...
June 4, 2020
This is well written and maybe deserves a higher rating because of that, but it didn't deliver on other things that I was hoping for. Maybe it's just me, but the eventual histrionics of the aunt which impact her nephew's happiness, after he'd spent so much time caring for her, really irked me. Maybe I just don't understand the impact of religion and standing in a small Irish rural community? Anyway, considering the title and that it is set in the Irish Countryside I was hoping for some nature writing with Joyce bits included. This isn't that. That and that the turning point of the books seems a bit much, it really never recovered from that for me.
July 29, 2020
Luke is back home living in his ancestral home with his elderly aunt close by. He is very committed to his family and finds himself facing a hard decision which has a surprising outcome. The best part of the book for me was Luke’s obsession with James Joyce and Ulysses. I loved that. The other theme of how rivers are formed, deviate, move from underground to overground and how they find their way to sea are compelling. The twists and turn meld well together and make this an unusual and interesting read.
May 17, 2020
Some wonderful lyrical writing punctuated for me with some dreary passages of overthinking and prevention. Loved the anecdotes about Joyce and Nora
February 1, 2021
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/t...
(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/t...
January 6, 2020
My first completed book of the year, which I expect to find on several prize lists for literary fiction. I finally got a payoff for spending a semester in university on James Joyce, but more earth science courses would have helped me understand parts of this!
October 25, 2019
The River Capture is a beautifully written book about Luke, a man in his late thirties living by himself in his family's old, rather grand, house beside a river in Waterford. He's taken a break from his teaching career in Dublin to try to write a book about Joyce but instead he's idled the time away.
As he struggles rather ineffectually to decide what to do next, into his life walks a young woman, Ruth, looking for someone to give a home to a dog belonging to her uncle who has gone into a nursing home. The blossoming of their relationship takes up the first half of the book. The second half focuses on the collapse of that relationship under the impact of revelations of past dealings between their two families.
For me, there's not quite enough plot to hold the novel together, particularly as the second half of the book is written in a kind of pastiche of the question and answer format that Joyce adopted in the Ithaca chapter of Ulysses.
It's witty – Luke is, after all, a man obsessed with Ulysses – and it's carried out with a remarkable degree of accomplishment, but it goes on too long. The relationship with Ruth is forgotten. Instead, the novel becomes a torrent of imagery as Luke seems to almost merge poetically with the river
There's a reason why Mary Costelloe adopts this stylistic device. The book's title and its central image, the river capture – a geomorphological phenomenon wherein a river is diverted from its bed and flows instead down the bed of a neighbouring river – describes both the physical reality of the environment in which Luke's house stands, and the course of his life which becomes hijacked by the family history and by the house itself. But after a while, it starts to feel more like a long poem and less like a novel. That said, Mary Costelloe is the kind of writer that makes me remember why I love to read: ambitious, lyrical, clever and full of insight.
As he struggles rather ineffectually to decide what to do next, into his life walks a young woman, Ruth, looking for someone to give a home to a dog belonging to her uncle who has gone into a nursing home. The blossoming of their relationship takes up the first half of the book. The second half focuses on the collapse of that relationship under the impact of revelations of past dealings between their two families.
For me, there's not quite enough plot to hold the novel together, particularly as the second half of the book is written in a kind of pastiche of the question and answer format that Joyce adopted in the Ithaca chapter of Ulysses.
It's witty – Luke is, after all, a man obsessed with Ulysses – and it's carried out with a remarkable degree of accomplishment, but it goes on too long. The relationship with Ruth is forgotten. Instead, the novel becomes a torrent of imagery as Luke seems to almost merge poetically with the river
There's a reason why Mary Costelloe adopts this stylistic device. The book's title and its central image, the river capture – a geomorphological phenomenon wherein a river is diverted from its bed and flows instead down the bed of a neighbouring river – describes both the physical reality of the environment in which Luke's house stands, and the course of his life which becomes hijacked by the family history and by the house itself. But after a while, it starts to feel more like a long poem and less like a novel. That said, Mary Costelloe is the kind of writer that makes me remember why I love to read: ambitious, lyrical, clever and full of insight.
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