FICTION
Salonika Burning
Gail Jones
Text, $34.99

In 1917 the cosmopolitan and multicultural city of Thessaloniki, then best known as Salonika, was largely incinerated by a fire that began with a single rogue spark in a cramped kitchen and ended up destroying two-thirds of the city and leaving more than 70,000 people homeless. Amid the chaos of the First World War, this violent, deadly, large-scale nightmare took place independently of the conflict, cutting across the war narrative of deliberate destruction and of territory gained and lost.

But the four main characters of this elegantly written and precisely structured novel, which circles round and round the fire and its aftermath, are all there in Macedonia as part of the war effort. They are British and Australian volunteers stationed in nearby Ostrovo and working with the tent hospital set up to deal with war casualties. One of these characters, Grace, is irritated by the way the Balkan front is represented as unimportant in the larger scheme of things: “She had seen it in an English newspaper sent from home: ‘Balkans Sideshow’. It meant they were less important and their efforts were worthless, with no real purpose.”

These four characters are all based on real people who were working at the hospital in Ostrovo at the time of the fire. The model for Stella, working as a hospital cook and orderly, is none other than the Australian writer Stella Miles Franklin.

Stanley, a volunteer medical orderly, is based on the gentle, eccentric British painter Stanley Spencer, and Olive on Olive Kelso King, a heroic Australian woman from a well-to-do Sydney family who was wealthy enough to provide her own ambulance and drive it back and forth with loads of supplies as well as wounded soldiers. The fourth character is based on a multi-talented rebel from a rigidly religious family, surgeon Grace Pailthorpe, who was also a Freudian psychoanalyst and a surrealist painter.

None of these people knows any of the others well, and their perceptions of the time and place they briefly share are braided together in a narrative held together by their common wartime purpose. The narrative shifts frequently from one character’s perspective to the next, as Jones pieces together a complex picture of the place and the time. But as she emphasises in an Author’s Note at the end, putting the four characters together in this real-life historical and geographical context was an act of imagination: “There is nothing I’ve discovered in the historical record that confirms these figures met or knew each other: this is a work of fiction, not history.”

Each character has a different way of seeing, and they use their respective jobs or vocations to try to create order from chaos. Stanley, looking at soaked piles of jumbled human belongings in the street after the fire, sees a pile of carefully stacked mirrors: “Stanley’s artist’s eye could not resist the ordinary grandeur there – the shifting angles and surfaces, the facets of gold from reflections. A small dog running past was doubled in a streak of light.”