Although Gail Jones’s latest novel unfolds in the midst of a war, there is a lot that sets it apart from traditional war narratives. In many ways, Salonika Burning is less war story proper and more war adjacent, the theme and setting of the book both offset slightly from the central conflict of the first world war. Jones, an award-winning novelist, writes about art and softness, where others tend to focus on the drama of strategy, action and trauma.
Her latest book connects four significant historical figures from Australia and Britain: the author Stella (Miles) Franklin, the adventurer Olive King and the artists Grace Pailthorpe and Stanley Spencer, who all become just Stella, Olive, Grace and Stanley in the book. In the author’s note, Jones clarifies that while all four really did serve time in the vicinity of Salonika (now Thessaloniki) during the war, there are no records that they met or knew each other; her use of their first names only is a nod to this fictional stretch. Such detachment works for the reader, who might otherwise become tangled in their knowledge of the future, in which Stella goes on to become one of Australia’s most famous authors and Stanley one of Britain’s most famous painters.
But here, before any of that happens, the four are to us as they are to each other: Stella, Olive, Grace and Stanley – a nurse, an ambulance driver, a surgeon and a medical orderly. They are brought together in a suffragette-run field hospital in Salonika, which was all but destroyed in the great fire. (Jones acknowledges that she has taken small fictional liberties with some specifics here too.)
Stanley is the outsider in many ways, as the book’s lone male protagonist, and because his path doesn’t cross the others until the book’s final scenes. His presence in the novel is felt less frequently but remains significant in the way he offers a gentler version of masculinity than the aggressors we’re primed to see in most wartime stories. On the other hand, Grace’s role as a surgeon isolates her professionally and emotionally from the other women, and she carries herself with a trained detachment: “It would be unwise at this stage to learn his [a patient’s] name, or any details. She must itemise the injury. She must not consider the human factor.”
Jones writes about gender and trauma with her trademark gentle touch. In an unassuming but deft way, she reveals sides to her four main characters that disrupt stereotypes. Stella is perhaps the flakiest of the four, or at least the one with the least defined purpose; she searches for approval and excitement, something to make meaning from in the war: “Her heart was full of righteous sympathy and the distinction of her book-learning meant that she might ennoble the city and honour it with her judicious witness. Olive had mentioned smouldering buildings and used the word ‘catastrophic’. Stella would like to see ‘catastrophic’. It would be something to write home about.”
Even though Stella wears her longing closer to the surface, all four of the characters are searching for meaning. This thread of isolation, and how all four long for connection but are unable (or unwilling) to reveal themselves fully to anyone, is made even more profound by the parallels to our recent shared experience amid Covid lockdowns. Jones isn’t speaking directly to the pandemic, but at the same time she is, writing in her acknowledgements that “this novel was written in circumstances of unusual isolation, during which time I was away from my home”. It is difficult not to see the allegory too, when she writes “people said ‘after the war’, but they also said ‘for the duration’, as if war had no schedule and would go on forever”.
There’s a wafer-thin current between self-protection and isolation that Jones seems to write into. We come to know these four characters intimately, but the tragedy is that they are unable to really know each other. Even structurally, they are separated, the novel reading almost like a collection of connected vignettes, and these snippets refute a reading that is too emotive or cathartic. At the end of the book there is one event that brings them together in a moment of terrible vulnerability, and this is the one time that Jones points a direct finger to the tragic, hypocritical injustices of combat, bringing the book to a close with a powerful sense of dramatic irony.
We might ask if we need another book about war right now – particularly about the first world war, which has (you might argue) been done to death in the literary canon. But Jones has, somehow, managed to capture something new. The question we’re left with as we close Salonika Burning is not “Why do we fight?” but “What matters beyond the fight?” or “What remains of us after it?”
Salonika Burning by Gail Jones is published by Text (A$34.99)
