The latest novel by the award-winning Sydney-based writer Gail Jones – author of 10 novels, a couple of short story collections and numerous critical works – is a complex and delicately written story about displacement, loss and the power of the imagination.
It’s 1992 and Helen is in Cambridge writing a doctoral thesis on one of the greatest writers in the western canon, Joseph Conrad. The author of Heart of Darkness was a Pole who settled in England, an outsider to the language that he used to write complex tales of guilt, betrayal, obsession and greed that were often inspired by his own experiences on the high seas.
While Helen is supposed to be writing a critical study, she in fact has two documents: “Her thesis and her anti-thesis.” This other fiction-oriented project is more concerned with imagining Conrad’s life, which we read in sections interspersed among Helen’s story. Helen pictures him as a child, as a husband, as a land-locked lover of the sea. It’s a way for Helen to escape the drudgery of her critical project, but more profoundly, it’s a way for her to feel a unique sort of kinship with her literary hero and a fellow outsider.
Helen muses on the trauma of Conrad’s early years, on his many adventures as a seaman (many of which took him to the ports of 19th-century Australia), his ailments, and his struggle to speak the English language (a fact that contrasts with his virtuosic mastery of writing and narrative). “She was in love not with concepts but with the human body, alive and historical. Conrad’s childhood above all: how it moved her, almost maternally. His boyhood terrors and shame.” This was a writer who experienced profound loneliness, was deeply frustrated with his longsuffering wife, Jessie, and their two children, and never really felt at home in any country.
When Helen loses her fiction manuscript, it’s a huge blow. A toxic relationship with Justin, a fellow PhD student, also threatens her sanity and safety. Justin dominates Helen, mocking and belittling her. They break up, but it is extremely messy and violent. Helen drops her doctoral project and becomes a cleaner: “It was a little like dying or disappearing, compressing into routine and self-erasure, but with the new satisfaction of a modest wage. The slumber of a cleaned room. The emptying out.”
One Another is written in the most beautiful, lucid prose. Reading this book I was struck again and again by Jones’s mastery of language (a trait she surely shares with Conrad). Structurally there’s an oscillating rhythm between Helen’s sections and the sections on Joseph. I found the sometimes opaque, sometimes direct relations between Helen’s present and her imagining of Joseph’s past to be very pleasurable and satisfying. Both lose and carry manuscripts (Joseph carries Almayer’s Folly, his first novel, for many years) that articulate so much longing and disappointment in their respective lives.
But I did find the character of Justin, Helen’s violent boyfriend, to be jarringly over the top. In a book built on the magically real and imagined links between the past of Conrad and the present of a young, out-of-place woman, Justin breaks the spell. Abusing Helen and her research, Justin proclaims: “There is no understanding. There is only data and despair.” His performative, calculated rants, out-of-control drinking and physical violence contrast with the deeply resonant and dreamy quality of Helen’s inner world, her imagining of Conrad’s life. These moments are just too jarring, but they don’t happen often enough to diminish the spell cast by Jones’s writing.
While One Another is a beautiful meditation on the power of the imagination to create meaning, at times I also struggled with Helen, finding her uninteresting and weak. “Sometimes Joseph feels he lives more in his written word than in what others call real life,” she writes of Conrad. The power of her obsession is something that many readers may find alien – but it is also the greatest strength of this book.
One Another by Gail Jones is published by Text ($34.99)
