This part of Helen’s life exists alongside a very ordinary existence where she works as a cleaner, and mostly mixes with rather dull people whose main interest is in drinking tea. She has one kind and interesting woman friend, Anuradha, named for the Indian goddess of good luck. However, Helen’s “reality” is in the life and work of Conrad.

With a nod to T.S.Eliot, Jones says Conrad “cannot bear too much reality”. But of course, he is going to have to bear a great deal, and so is Helen, in different and excruciating ways.

Conrad’s vocabulary is one of “distance and mystery”, and for the reader’s information and pleasure, there is a list, almost one-page long, of words from Heart of Darkness. “Inscrutable, immense, interrupted” – many of the words begin with the letter “i”. And, yes, this is a novel concerned with identity, with the role of others in the construction of the self.

Conrad’s personal history is such a long way from that of Helen, and yet Helen is seen to be overwhelmed and inhabited by him. Without Conrad, could there ever have been the Helen the reader knows? After all the agonies and atrocities of the tale, there is, however, hope for the future. Perhaps finding the anti-thesis marks the turning point in Helen’s fate. “What accidents of deep imagining produce literary futures?”

One Another is a highly sophisticated act of prestidigitation that is a joy to read and absorb, a narrative on which to reflect, to dream. It begins with Conrad’s recurring dream of his mother and father and snow.

“Always the same pointless fragment.” It ends with Conrad’s death as the visions of his mother and father “visit, then float away”, and he sinks, “washed by kind waves” hearing “no language at all but that of the ocean”.

And Helen? She is setting off for Amsterdam to “become European” and work as an au pair. She still has a long way to go, but her time with Conrad would seem to be complete. The violet light playing over the Derwent will play over Anuradha who is on her way to Hobart to research the story of a 19th-century convict.

An “ellipsis of pigeons” swings through the sky over Cambridge, and wave by wave Gail Jones’ exquisite prose moves deep into the heart of Joseph Conrad, sending the reader back to the novels he wrote.

Carmel Bird’s most recent books are a short-story collection Love Letter To Lola (Spineless Wonders) and a children’s picture book, Arabella (Treasure Street).