Gail Jones, One Another

- An excellent read once again from Gail Jones. I loved her previous novels and this is right up there with her best. 

- At first it's a bit hard to like but perseverance pays off in spades. Helen, an Australian post-graduate student at Cambridge, is researching her thesis on the Polish/British author Joseph Conrad. He was a man of the sea and also a celebrated man of letters who died in 1924 at the age of sixty-six. The novel switches back and forth from Helen's travails in Cambridge to Conrad's many sea journeys and writings, and manages to absorb the reader in both their personal and professional conundrums. 

- Joseph was not a well man. He suffered from many serious health conditions, and was unhappily married. But Helen knows him as 'a man of the plot. Unlike many contemporary writers, less committed to the logic of adventure, he loves a rollicking story. Intrigue, murder, suicide and spies’. She's captivated by them and finds solace in them. Her own personal life is falling apart. Her boyfriend, another Australian student in Cambridge, is violent and abusive. She must be honest with herself and her friends. 

- She happens to lose her draft thesis on a train. We learn that many well known authors also lost manuscripts. There is 'a long notorious history' of this - T. E. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Malcolm Lowry, Dylan Thomas, and Sylvia Plath were among them. 

- Her manuscript is found, thankfully, but subsequent events, associated with her boyfriend, turn ugly. Tragedy is an outcome.

- Jones is focussed on the inner person, the anxieties, fears, failures and hopes. It's a very sensitive exploration. She also explores their forbears - parents, grandparents and siblings, and the places they lived their lives. At Cambridge Helen has empathetic and generous friends, and there are lovely and supportive older people in her life. Her natural tendency 'is to protect her Joseph, hapless and uncertain, acquiring over his thirty years in England a lustre of gentlemanly shine, even as he felt rather tarnished within...all his life he is a man who thinks  he is dying, not living....He feels miserable, boring, invalid and old'. 

- Most of us have read Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. 'Conrad's plots make him a favourite for film adaptations. There are thirty or forty out there, possibly more, beginning in the silent era'. Marlon Brando played Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, based on Heart of Darkness ('the horror, the horror'). That novel is unforgettable, a masterpiece. 

- Gail Jones has written, in her own way, a masterpiece. A magnificent achievement.