Salonika Burning
The novel opens with harrowing scenes of the great fire sweeping through Salonika in 1917. It destroys two-thirds of the ancient city and leaves countless thousands homeless.
Four witnesses to this event are real people who were little-known at the time but went on to greater fame. (The author’s notes expand on who they are.) Here, they are simply Stella, journalist and assistant cook; wealthy Olive, who drives her own ambulance; Grace, surgeon in the Scottish Women’s Hospital; and Stanley, medical orderly and artist.
Diseases, especially malaria, felled more troops in the “Balkans sideshow” of World War I than battles, and this novel is also a sideshow in its way, focusing primarily on these individuals and their struggles in their respective situations.
Stella is a fierce imperialist who cloaks the reality of war, writing of “beautiful Serbian men.” Olive despises herself and others who are “safe and sound.” Grace has “no regard for the dense world of sentiment, for small, fragile and personal things.” Stanley agonises that “nothing … had any meaning” and prefers to communicate with mules. The bizarre arrival of a shipment of frozen rabbit carcasses from Australia and the illicit treatment of a wounded German soldier bring these four together.
The author freely admits that she has taken “many liberties” with both history and the characters, who are unlikely to have encountered one another. This makes for a quandary in summarising this compact novel. Readers who favour literary fiction will appreciate its creativity and exceptional narrative skill in relating the group’s inner conflicts and therefore may be unconcerned with historical anomalies. Other readers might wish for a more inclusive, accurate story that gives voice to the unsung participants in the Macedon Campaign and those Salonika residents who tragically lost everything.
