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!

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/04/04/one-another-2024-by-gail-jones/ ( )