The first pages of Gail Jones’ beautiful new novel, Salonika Burning, offer a vision. The image is of a city on fire, watched by soldiers at a distance who despite, or perhaps because of, their familiarity with devastation, are transfixed “with indecent pleasure” by the sight.
There is a perverse beauty in obliteration that the soldiers intuit. The novel partly turns on this tension as it grapples with how to represent loss and the absurdity of “humans and beasts, crisscrossing the globe so that men could line up to slaughter each other”.
