Salonika Burning (Gail Jones, Text)

Award-winning novelist Gail Jones’s new offering adapts the First World War experiences of four very real people: British artists Grace Pailthorpe and Stanley Spencer, and Australians Olive King and Stella ‘Miles’ Franklin. However, Jones firmly clarifies this novel is very much fiction. Set outside Salonika in Macedonia (Thessaloniki today), on the lesser referenced Eastern Front of the war, it takes place in the aftermath of the great fire of 1917, which razed the worldly city. Jones portrays Salonika as a colourful tapestry of culture and ancient heritage that becomes a haunted scene of charcoaled structures. The female characters volunteer for the Scottish Women’s Hospital, whereas Stanley rescues injured British soldiers from battlefields with his team of mules. This novel is driven by imagery, character and encounter. There is a languid sense of timelessness amid the helplessness, deprivation and annihilation of war, suggestive of the ever-present torpor of malarial fever, which plagues the ravaged city. The characters spend their lives in limbo, in a swirl of death, yet endure for their cause: the salvation of others and the relief of suffering. While comforted by golden-tinged memories, they battle their own demons with emotional stoicism. Fans of Jones’s gift with words will appreciate this moving, poetic and meditative tribute to war, suffering, fortitude and the human spirit. It is worth reading, not least to uncover enchanting examples of the inspired way Jones uses descriptive language, many of which will resonate long after the final page.

Joanne Shiells is a former editor of B+P and a Melbourne English teacher.

Category: Reviews