I have had a mixed experience with the novels of Gail Jones, one of our most prominent authors. I read her early work somewhat unenthusiastically with a book group, but liking her more recent novels has prompted me to explore her backlist, along with her latest releases.
- Black Mirror (2002, now on the TBR)
- Sixty Lights (2004, read & journalled in 2005)
- Dreams of Speaking (2006, read & journalled in 2007)
- Sorry
- Five Bells (2011, on the TBR)
- A Guide to Berlin (2015, on the TBR)
- The Death of Noah Glass (2018, see my review)
- Our Shadows (2020, see my review)
- Salonika Burning (2022, see my review)
- One Another (2024)
I haven’t read (but have just bought a Kindle edition of) Jones’s debut novel Black Mirror (2002). However, having come across a review of it in The Age, I am tempted to suggest that One Another revisits its theme. Apparently Black Mirror is about an idealistic young Australian in London who has her romantic notions quashed by reality, and so too is One Another. Both protagonists are exploring the lives of cultural icons: Anna Griffin in Black Mirror is writing a biography of a (fictional) surrealist artist called Victoria Morrell, and in One Another, Helen Ross is in Cambridge to do a PhD on Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), the author of Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900) and Almayer’s Folly (1895, see my review). In both of these novels, Jones explores the theme of disappointing intercultural experiences and landscapes. The restlessness that prompts Australians to travel in pursuit of their ambitions is still a preoccupation in these novels written more than two decades apart, and the disappointment when expectations aren’t realised is also a recurring theme in Jones’s most recent fiction. (Particularly in Salonika Burning. Who can forget Stella’s frustrations in that novel, eh?)
In One Another, the central character Helen has been conjuring Conrad since she first read his work as a teenager, her interest triggered by visiting the Tasmanian resting place of the remains of the Otago. As you can see from my travel blog (where I like to record Bookish Moments) I was very excited to see it too:
… I went to the [Hobart] Maritime Museum and had an unexpected literary treat. There amongst all sorts of model ships and boats, bits of rope, knots and so forth, was a display about the three masted barque Otago, which was the ship commanded by Joseph Conrad in 1888-9. He took command of this ship in Bangkok, sailed it to Sydney, Melbourne, Mauritius and Adelaide before resigning his command because the owners didn’t want him to sail it on to China. It was this journey that formed the basis of his writings about the South Seas, and it is therefore a very great pity that the remains of this ship are being left to rot at Otago Bay in Risden [where we later saw it in situ]. I got quite a thrill from being allowed to touch the hatch that has been salvaged from the ship and restored – Conrad must also have grasped it on his way down below decks!
So you can see how I relate to Helen — who isn’t able to explain her thesis to her parents back home, nor to anyone else — when she pretends to herself that she knew Conrad intimately, as if from the inside.
Some quality of her reading life puffed characters into people and writers into companions. For years she subdued this instinct, but it returned and settled within her. Not identification — nothing so crass — but a flow into fiction’s otherness that welcomed and accommodated her. Imagining the lives of characters was like imagining friends, those affectionate speculations, the sense of wishing to share in their feelings and witness their experiences. And at times almost a delusion, when she wept at the end of a book for a person made up only of words. (p.9)
One Another is worth reading for that paragraph alone!
Along with Helen’s other disappointments at Cambridge, she — like Conrad who left his MS of Almayer’s Folly in a café — has lost her manuscript, her thesis on ‘Joseph Conrad: Cryptomodernism* and Empire’. She left it on a train. (It’s 1992, so there isn’t a backup in The Cloud.)
It was not a serious manuscript, not a true biography, but fragments of a life intersected by literary-critical notations. Helen consoled herself with the knowledge that it was unpublishable — too fanciful for the scholar, too scholarly for a general reader — so that by stages she reconciled to the idea of useless labour and pages never read. In one vision she saw her manuscript flying out of a train window, lifting on the gush of slipstream, skittish and bright, a line of A4s twisting and fluttering in a zesty rise, like so many loosened kites. In another she saw it stolen by a man in his fifties, bald, de-nationalised, with greasy fingers. He chanced upon it and left smudgy fingerprints as he turned the pages, scowling. It was this version of loss that most alarmed her. Better flying pages, hopelessly scattered in the wind, than a mean reader, censoring, and his intrusive grubby remarks.
She was a rationalist, she told herself, and able to renounce possession. But still it stung. To lose an entire manuscript, and all that work. (p.4)
Indeed. Devastating, no matter how one might rationalise it…
Fragments of Helen’s thoughts about Conrad weave through the novel, and especially if you like Conrad, you’ll enjoy discovering new insights and some titles you haven’t read before, as well as correspondences between the character and the writer. Like Conrad, Helen is an ‘outsider’… and not just in the insularity of Cambridge, but also at home in Tasmania, because she was born in Sydney.
The girls at school conceded she was clever, but she remained unpopular. She would always be a ‘mainlander’ in this small community, one who came from somewhere that had little imaginative claim on her peers. ‘You have to be born here,’ one of the meaner girls announced, and since she could never repair her birthplace Helen accepted that she would eventually leave. Her brothers played cricket and rugby league, and grew sarcastic. They were acceptable migrants, already beefy and athletic, already invited to stay. (p.40)
Quite apart from her (wholly justifiable) doubts about her toxic boyfriend Justin —Helen’s experience of intellectual companionship at Cambridge is alienating too. There are parallels again with Conrad, who, despite writing all his successful stories in English, was never accepted as ‘British’ because of his Polish accent and grammatical lapses. Helen’s Australian accent marks her out as an uncouth Australian, and she disappoints the one fellow-student who implicitly shared her political sympathies because Helen was unable to answers questions about convicts transported for political reasons. Anuradha’s thesis is about Chartism…
Helen had never heard of William Cuffay, son of a West Indian slave, transported for twenty-one years to Van Dieman’s Land as a political prisoner. Anuradha was focusing her study in William Cuffay, and Helen’s link to Tasmania excited and interested her.
How to explain that her self-fashioning demanded a rejection of home? Helen refused the dirty allure of convicts; she found too overwhelming the horror of frontier wars and the killing of Indigenous people. She felt these were not her stories; she was distant; she was self-protecting and disengaged. (p.35)
The other students use their scholarship to diminish Helen’s:
One of the women at college quoted Nabokov with the hint of a sneer: Conrad had a souvenir-shop style, all bottled ships and the shell necklaces of romantic clichés; in mentality and emotions he was hopelessly juvenile. Helen argued against such snobbery, but she was defensive and undermined. Justin too thought her topic a waste of time, and with each visit to a pub — ‘fieldwork’, he called it, she saw his tendency to insult increase, as he became loud and slurry. (p.5)
Helen’s father’s death and a catastrophic event involving Justin combine to form the catalyst for her to abandon her PhD. This means she has to move out of college, and earn some kind of income while she works out what to do. In a dreary boarding house, she finds herself re-living life at home with her mother. She is more than a bit lost, a highly intelligent young woman taking comfort in a mindless cleaning job and the order of supermarket layouts. I won’t be the only reader whose heart aches for Helen.
Reading One Another — and ‘living’ the traumatic episodes of Helen’s life is an engrossing reading experience, one which mirrors Helen’s imaginative response to Conrad when she pretends that she knew him intimately…
* I have no idea what Cryptomodernism is. When I Googled it, all I could find that seemed remotely relevant was a site about an artist called Doris Bittar and her bio talks about overlapping colonial heritages and identities within historical contexts. The patterns in her artworks refer to cultural DNA mutating in tandem with human migration and attached to codes of decorum that may facilitate unnavigable discourse.
Author: Gail Jones
Title: One Another
Publisher: Text Publishing, 2024
Cover design by W H Chong
ISBN: 9781922790644, pbk., 220 pages
Source: personal library, purchased from Benn’s Books Bentleigh, $34.99
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 
I have an audio of this book waiting in my listening queue. Reading your review, I’m FURIOUS at myself for not getting to the Maritime Museum, which I would have been doing today had Virgin not brought my flight back to Melbourne forward by five hours! Anyway, I have another trip to Hobart planned for early 2025, so will make it a priority for my next visit.
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By: Kate W on April 4, 2024
at 8:50 pm
Virgin, how dare they?!
TBH, I know it’s a bit naff to get a thrill out of that Bookish Moment, but I really was excited.
I used to get to Hobart every other year because The Spouse had a biennial conference there, and I would go along for the weekend, pottering around the waterfront, doing historic walks, and reading books at Salamanca in the cafes. And splendid dinners when we reunited at the end of the day. I love Hobart.
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By: Lisa Hill on April 4, 2024
at 10:27 pm
I’m looking forward to reading this at some point. I went and saw Gail Jones before Easter. She did an event at Cottesloe Civic Centre arranged by an indie bookstore in Claremont. She’s a fascinating speaker and made me think about novels and their purpose in a different way. I can see she’d be an excellent lecturer; she was so thoughtful and knowledgeable without being a show off. Unfortunately I thought the event was let down by the interviewer, a local author and former Jones’ student, who waffled on about her own experience reading the book without framing her questions properly. Often Jones would sit there a bit flummoxed wondering how to respond! My pet hate is authors interviewing authors and this was a prime example of why it simply does not work. That aside, it was fascinating to hear about Conrad’s life and how Jones came to write the book, and why she framed it the way she did.
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By: kimbofo on April 4, 2024
at 9:53 pm
I’ve got a ticket to hear her in a session at the Sorrento Writers Festival later this month. All to herself, that is, in conversation, but not competing with other authors for time.
With the gigs I’ve done, the ones I liked best were the ones in conversation, because you can really dig into the book or books that they’ve written. With a panel, the more guests you have, the less time they get AND they’re supposed to stick to a predetermined theme.
And I agree about getting someone who knows what they’re doing to do the interview. No names, sorry, but one I went to, on Zoom during Covid, did its author a real disservice, the two of them nattering on with in-jokes about their vacuous 30-something lives, and so I never read the book.
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By: Lisa Hill on April 4, 2024
at 10:17 pm
Oh, you will love hearing her speak!
And agree, panel discussions on predetermined topics can be a bit tricky.
I find that when authors interview authors it just gets bogged down in tedious discussions about writing processes (forgetting that they’re talking to READERS) and finding common ground or flattering each other and failing to analyse the work properly. I went to one event where they just talked about people they knew. B O R I N G. And completely irrelevant to 100% of the audience 🙄
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By: kimbofo on April 4, 2024
at 10:23 pm
Yup. I hear you!
I’m going to lots of interesting sessions, but also Charlotte Wood:)
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By: Lisa Hill on April 4, 2024
at 10:33 pm
Enjoy! It sounds like a fab festival.
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By: kimbofo on April 4, 2024
at 10:34 pm
I have plans to write it up.
But we also have bookings at three very fine restaurants for dinners over the weekend, and I may be tempted by an after-dinner cognac… which may affect the coherence of my reports.
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By: Lisa Hill on April 4, 2024
at 10:37 pm
😆
I never write things up… it’s too much like my day job. (Which is currently FULL ON.)
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By: kimbofo on April 4, 2024
at 10:38 pm
Yes, I gathered that.
Look after yourself…
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By: Lisa Hill on April 4, 2024
at 10:42 pm
While I must confess I have a deep suspicion of the tendency so many novelist have of attaching their novels to historical figures — a cheap trick to bolster sales, it seems to me — I just might be tempted into reading this one to learn more about what Conrad has meant to Jones. For me, too, like Jones’ narrator, Conrad has been a significant life companion — so much so that I started reading his books aloud for Librivox as a way of personally honouring what he has meant to me, and have now recorded all his (completed) books there.
In one of these (“A Personal Record”) Conrad describes not the loss of his “Almayer’s Folly” MS at a railway station, but its near loss: “And so it happened that I very nearly lost the MS., advanced now to the first words of the ninth chapter, in the Friedrichstrasse railway station (that’s in Berlin, you know), on my way to Poland, or more precisely to Ukraine. On an early, sleepy morning changing trains in a hurry I left my Gladstone bag in a refreshment-room. A worthy and intelligent Koffertrager rescued it. Yet in my anxiety I was not thinking of the MS. but of all the other things that were packed in the bag.”
Earlier in the same work, Conrad describes how he nearly lost the same MS when his canoe, carrying all his luggage, capsized on the Congo, but “Providence saved my MS. from the Congo rapids”.
Whether Jones asserts in her novel that Conrad actually lost his MS or merely nearly lost it I cannot tell, but if the former is the case I will be sorry, as it will likely only further confirm my prejudice against works of fiction that appear, anyway, to seek to enlist “star power” to boost their appeal.
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By: peterjdann6c4eb6b31b on April 5, 2024
at 7:56 am
Hello Peter, thank you for this comment. It made me realise immediately that I am at fault: I haven’t made it clear — as Jones does in her Afterword — that this is a fictionalised Conrad. She says that she draws on Conrad’s own writings “liberally”, and she acknowledges that “There exists a huge amount of biographical and literary-critical scholarship on Conrad, only a fraction of which I have read. This short novel is not a work of original scholarship. It has necessarily drawn on, and in come cases summarised, the work of eminent scholars.”
I would have to re-read the novel again to check whether the MS was lost, nearly lost, or lost and then returned. I didn’t think it was important to know exactly, so I didn’t make an exact note of it, because what matters to these two protagonists is the anxiety about it and the idea of losing something so precious.
I hear what you say about ‘enlisting star power’: I think Wifedom falls into that category. I felt indignant when Richard Flanagan used Dickens in Wanting. But this novel, I think, is more of a meditation on how we come to love authors dead and alive, and think that we know them, and the more we read and re-read of their work, the more important they become to us.
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By: Lisa Hill on April 5, 2024
at 8:38 am
PS Re the Almayer MS…
I’ve just checked another review of this book at the Conversation by Sue Kossew, and that refers to Conrad losing his MS in a cafe in Berlin. So that seems like confirmation that Jones has departed from the historical record for her own purposes of patterning her character with Conrad.
Kossew’s review is here: https://theconversation.com/gail-jones-one-another-explores-the-life-of-joseph-conrad-and-the-transformative-potential-of-reading-222980
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By: Lisa Hill on April 5, 2024
at 10:33 am
Yes, I noticed that too. It seems to me there is a pretty strong element of I’ll-both-have-my-cake-and-eat-it with accounts that purport to have some historical content, but then ‘adjust’ the record when it suits. I’m broadly sympathetic with the goal of trying to share what an author has meant to one, but not at any price. I’m far less well read than yourself, but the author I know who does this best — and I think he does it really scrupulously, and without any hint of compromise — is Gerald Murnane.
>
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By: peterjdann6c4eb6b31b on April 5, 2024
at 10:42 am
Ah well, Murnane, now we are talking about someone who should have got the Nobel years ago. In a class of his own!
In general, very general terms, I think that using historical personages shows a lack of imagination, and a failure to engage with the important issues of the time. And there’s a bit of a fad for it, most of it written by much lesser authors than Gail Jones. I’m always banging on about this: I don’t know whether it emerges from creative writing schools or it’s just the latest bandwagon, or both.
So much of current fiction draws its shallow content from social media and tabloid angst, or using a well-known author or The Wife Of some historical personage — not merely to attract attention but also to dress up the fiction as scholarly research for the purposes of a PhD. And the scholarship funding that goes with it. Sometimes it works, and I enjoy it. The ones you see reviewed here on the blog are mostly the ones I’ve liked. But there are more than a few that have made their way to recycling that I haven’t bothered with…
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By: Lisa Hill on April 5, 2024
at 11:10 am
I’m going to the launch of the Jones book later this month. 🌻
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By: TravellinPenguin on April 5, 2024
at 11:12 pm
Wonderful!
Please tell us all about it when you do.
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By: Lisa Hill on April 6, 2024
at 8:44 am
I tried A Guide to Berlin but didn’t get very far with it
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By: BookerTalk on April 11, 2024
at 7:25 am
That’s on my TBR, but I already know that it’s a ‘Marmite’ book, love it or hate it.
But it’s interesting that you had access to a copy. Is she stocked in bookshops in your part of the world?
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By: Lisa Hill on April 11, 2024
at 8:58 am