One Another
Gail Jones
Text Publishing, 2024
One Another contains two parallel and interrelated stories – one about Joseph Conrad, his life and writing, and the other about Helen, Tasmanian student of literature in Cambridge, who is writing a thesis about him. Well, she’s writing two theses really – a thesis and an “anti-thesis”, which is much more personal, exploring aspects of Conrad’s life, opinions and experiences and her strongly felt resonances with them.
Early in the story she loses her anti-thesis on the train and finds the loss unmooring. Helen has found solace in the writings of Conrad since her Tasmanian teenagerhood, and Jones relates the experiences that informed his fiction intensely interesting and meaningful.
Helen is described early in the novel as a “postgraduate failure” and withdraws from her candidature and her college with her degree incomplete. During her time at Cambridge, she meets Justin and begins a relationship with him. She quickly becomes alarmed by his violence and severs their connection, taking steps to protect herself and those around her which aren’t always successful.
While Conrad’s experiences of the dark side of human nature informed some of the most profound examples of English literature, also having been made into memorable films like Apocalypse Now, Helen cannot seem to make sense of what has befallen her or navigate her way through it with responsibility and purpose. She finds much of what occurs in her life incomprehensible and meaningless and instead is attracted by the solitude and ritual of tidying and cleaning.
Helen’s sense of her identity is nebulous and unformed, whereas Conrad’s is shaped by the relentless representations of time, fiction and biography.
Another highly engaging and substantial story from Gail Jones that interweaves the past with the present, exploring how our lives are transformed by powerful literature.
