One Another (Gail Jones, Text)

Expect no less from Gail Jones’s tenth novel, One Another, than carefully crafted prose that will delight and assure you of an expert at work. With a languid sense of time and place, Jones unravels the intertwined stories of Helen, a Cambridge scholarship student from Tasmania, with that of her thesis subject—the novelist Joseph Conrad. The narrative drifts seamlessly from the ‘dreaming spires’ and back lanes of 1990s Cambridge to Conrad’s 19th-century globe-crossing seafaring adventures. Disengaged from her formal literary thesis, the dreamy Helen gives up her scholarship, instead making obsessive notes on Conrad’s life. When this alternative thesis is—like one of Conrad’s novels—dramatically lost, Helen becomes unmoored, while she is also processing the death of her father, as well as her relationship with a violent and controlling man. Meanwhile, Conrad’s life is told in vignettes: being orphaned as a young boy, enduring bouts of illness and recovery, setting off for life at sea, becoming a husband, learning English, and sharing tales of great drama in Africa, Australia, and across southeast Asia. From the intensity and drama of his part in the story, Conrad could well be a fictional character; that he is not lends a greater sense of fascination to this tale, and no foreknowledge of his life or work is necessary. Jones (Salonika Burning) has delved into literary history again and pieced the real and the imaginary into an artful new construction. One Another is highly recommended for those interested in literature, history or biographies.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Joanne Shiells is a former bookseller and editor of B+P and Melbourne high school English teacher. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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