Set in 1917 Macedonia during WWI, this story takes a different narrative road by following, not soldiers nor the domestic homefront but those who volunteered to help in the medical corps. Based on the experiences of four very real Australian volunteers, Gail Jones tells us the stories of Grace, a surgeon; Olive, an ambulance driver (who brought her own vehicle); Stella, a cook’s helper, and Stanley, an artist by trade, who was “unsuited for soldiering but wished fervently for adventure” and became an orderly. As the book flap says:”Amid the destruction are those who have come to the frontline to heal….”

Jones is a wonderful writer, always infusing her stories with great compassion, and this immersive book is no different (It’s why I love her work). ( )

Gail Jones ninth novel is an interesting addition to Australia's literature of World War 1. Salonika Burning attracted my attention because it features a fictionalised 'Miles Franklin' in a setting I'd encountered before, in The Sorrow of Miles Franklin beneath Mount Kajmakčalan, by Ivan Čapovski, translated by Paul Filev (Cadmus Press, 2020, see my review). Both novels are inspired by an episode in MF's life when she was briefly working behind the lines in WW1 with the Scottish Women’s Hospital in Serbian Ostrovo. (It is now Lake Vergoritis, Pella Prefecture, in Hellas. National borders and place names change *a lot* in this part of the world). Čapovski's novel uses MF primarily as a witness to atrocities little-known within the dominant narratives of the war, while Jones counters the prevailing Anzac narrative in a different way.

The four main characters of Salonika Burning are all fictionalised versions of real people who served behind the Balkan front lines as volunteers. Their real life identities are Australians Stella Miles Franklin and wealthy adventurer Olive King who bought her own ambulance; along with the surgeon, painter and psychology researcher Grace Pailthorpe and the proselytizing painter Stanley Spencer, who were both British. As Gail Jones explains in the Author's Note, none of these people ever met each other in real life, and in the novel, only their first names are given, to disassociate them from their postwar lives.

Of these four characters, only Stella had much of a public profile before the war — but what fame she had achieved in Australia with her notable novel (an allusion to My Brilliant Career, 1901) is lost on her colleagues. Indeed, Stella's lowly position in this setting is a humiliating comedown for someone whose authorial ambitions were never matched by achievements after the success of that first novel. [She was no Louise Mack, the notable Australian journalist who was the first female war correspondent, reporting from Belgium for the Evening News and the Daily Mail.] All of the novel's characters are outsiders, and their motivations are primarily a search for relevance. They are people marking time in a war that is mostly offstage and in different ways they are experiencing profound disillusionment.

None of them think that they are being really useful. Soldiers die despite the surgeon's best efforts, and once because of a mistake Grace made under the pressure of time. Spencer gets told to stop his religious ravings because the army will not abide a raver and is put in charge of the donkeys. Olive's ambulance is used as a delivery vehicle when supplies run short because of the disaster in Salonika. Bossed around by a matron, with no interest or aptitude for cooking even if there were access to decent food, Stella is not a nurse as portrayed on the cover of Čapovski's novel.

The characterisation of MF is a counter to her semi-heroic image as fostered by the literary prizes in her name. In San Francisco to seek her own meaning she left within days of the 1906 earthquake, dismayed by the ruins, the despair and the sense of hope overturned.

Decisive, Stella bought a train ticket east. There was no point staying, and San Francisco didn't want her. What could be more alien than an Australian woman, motivated by unionism and women's rights, wandering distrait in a ruined city? (p.26)

She was irrelevant then, but is hopeful of being relevant in this war.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/11/23/salonika-burning-by-gail-jones/ ( )

(7.5) ( )