One Another, Gail Jones, Text Publishing.
What makes a writer? When Gail Jones was 14, her parents, realising she was somehow ‘arty’, suggested that she leave school to become a florist. Fortunately for her large and admiring readership, Jones resisted this suggestion and went on to win several awards and to establish an international reputation as a novelist. She is also an academic, currently Professor of Writing at Western Sydney University.
Some people become writers because of their circumstances; others become writers despite them. Both Gail Jones and Joseph Conrad, the subject of her novel One Another, belong in the latter category. Conrad was the only son of Polish patriots and was orphaned at the age of eleven. He endured much in his early years but was fortunate in being placed in the care of a loving uncle. Conrad’s life proceeded in unexpected ways: he became a wanderer and sailor, voyaged to Australia and eventually settled in England. Although he never felt comfortable when speaking English and had a strong accent, he wrote brilliant novels in this language that was not his own.
Conrad’s health was always a problem: he attempted suicide when he was a young man, and throughout his life afterwards was often depressed and ill. Today’s psychiatrists would likely talk in terms of unresolved trauma. Jones writes that ‘Joseph will trade words against death, as many writers do’. Other writers in this category are surely Hemingway, Orwell and Fitzgerald.
In One Another Jones’s protagonist is Helen, who is writing a thesis on Joseph Conrad at the University of Cambridge: Cryptomodernism and Empire. The narrative establishes parallel layers of alienation in the histories and experiences of Helen herself and of the man who is the focus of her work. Helen is from Tasmania, but lived in Sydney until she was ten and is thus considered an outsider in Hobart — a Mainlander rather than an Islander. Helen’s mother Moira, however, is a ‘real’ Tasmanian, having convict ancestry and having what Helen sees as a pioneering and patriotic spirit: the family home is called Gallipoli. As an Australian in England, Helen is considered an outsider there too. Joseph Conrad was always an outsider: indeed, for most of his life, Poland did not exist, having been carved up by Russia, Prussia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
One recurring element in Jones’s novels is the matter of Australians being away from home. In Dreams of Speaking, the