Avid readers, teachers, students, and journalists alike gathered in Gleebooks’ newly renovated upstairs events area to hear the acclaimed novelist Gail Jones speak about her latest work, One Another (2024). The multi-award-winning author Jones spoke for over an hour to the large crowd about her latest work, its influences, her writing process, and her journey as a novelist. Supported by Western Sydney University’s Writing and Society Research Centre, the event was chaired by Emeritus Professor Sue Kossew. Almost all audience members seemed to possess a copy of the novel, hastily scribbling down notes in the margins as Jones explained its various themes and images. At the heart of this talk was Jones’ exploration of the intersections between art and life, as relayed in her distinctively immersive prose that radiates across her ten novels.
One Another follows Helen, a Tasmanian student completing her thesis on Joseph Conrad at Cambridge University in the early 1990s. As Helen becomes increasingly immersed in Conrad’s work, the boundary between critic and subject — between reader and writer — begins to blur, their lives intersecting in surprising ways.
Much of the talk was dedicated to discussing the novel’s genesis. The creative process is something that has always fascinated Jones. This was especially true in the writing of One Another which, unlike her more carefully planned works, came about through a surprising pastiche of inspirations and encounters. At the beginning of 2022, Jones was offered a writing fellowship in Hobart. Although she didn’t think she would be able to produce a novel, she found inspiration almost immediately when she visited Conrad’s shipwrecked boat in the River Derwent. She was fascinated by the image of the shipwreck. “It was a contradiction,” she said, “there was this lifeless body filled with movement.”
That very evening Jones learnt of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This reminded her of Conrad’s own Ukrainian heritage and the dislocation he experienced as a child when he was forced to move to England. Much like her protagonist, Jones began to immerse herself in Conrad’s work. Only fourteen weeks later, Jones returned to the mainland with a complete draft of the novel.
Joseph and Helen have parallel narratives that move into each other and drift apart, much like the flowing of the Derwent, as one astute reader pointed out. Jones liked the suggestion and said that the initial image played an important role in crafting the novel’s “ripple effect”. These “ripples” mean that it is a highly layered text, always opening up and revealing new connections between the characters. It is never clear why Helen finds herself drawn so intensely to Conrad’s work. Perhaps it is her sense of dislocation when she arrives in Cambridge from her small town in Hobart, or their shared experience of violence and isolation.
Jones discussed the novel’s structure as being written “in a series of fragments”, mirroring the style of her previous works. Jones also talked about how this fragmentary element aimed to mirror tidal currents, a recurring motif across the novel. This fragmentary nature also permitted her to constantly move between past tense and present tense throughout the work. While Conrad’s sections of the novel are narrated in a very active present tense, Helen’s story uses the past tense. As Jones stated, her aim in doing so was “to explore what it means to imagine the past in the present,” explaining that these fragments were designed to mirror those “acts of consciousness that we enter into as we read [a novel].”
At the core of the talk was the novelist’s fascination with the relationship between readers and writers. Like many writers, Jones noted that she is constantly shaped by the works of other authors whose voices have become part of her own consciousness. Reading, according to her , is about negotiating with a consciousness other than our own. As Joseph Conrad’s presence in One Another exemplifies, books are as important as people in shaping who we are.
Gail Jones’ One Another (2024), published by Text Publishing, is available in bookstores.