Love in the Wasteland

As millions of tourists descend upon the Greek Islands this summer, the internet will overflow with images: Cycladic homes, ruins, pebbled beaches and blue seas. What we won’t see is the waste—over 200,000 tonnes of it. Much of it will end up in illegal landfill, hidden from sight. It’s this: the waste, the refuse, the silences and the ‘gap of denial’ that Blueberries (Text, 2020) author Ellena Savage seeks to uncover in her debut novel The Ruiners (Summit, 2026).

The novel begins with Pip, a 29-year-old orphan who spends her days waiting on bibbed-adults at Claws, a lobster restaurant described as a ‘garish chain of slaughterhouses’. The story kicks into gear when she inherits $50,000 and meets Sasha, a scholar of Balkan literature and misunderstood hero of his own story. For reasons practical and romantic, they get married and spend Pip’s inheritance on a decrepit house on Fokos, a fictional Greek Island. On arrival, they find the village deserted and their house a fetid shell, casting a dark shadow over their plans.

Cue a visit from Vivek, an old friend and the editor of an insolvent socialist magazine. He’s a ‘real Marxist’, which means he’s planning to go on strike against himself in solidarity with the writers who haven’t been paid. Succumbing to paranoia over his imminent cancellation, he seeks redemption via a Pulitzer-worthy feature on the locally dubbed ifaísteio (volcano): the illegal, toxic landfill. Conveniently, this project provides cause to summon photographer Aggelos, an ex-boyfriend with whom he’d like to hazard a second chance.

In Savage’s acclaimed essay collection Blueberries, she applies the writerly ‘I’ to examine the nexus of identity, power and desire. In The Ruiners, Savage applies the same mode of inquiry but with three fictional I’s, highlighting the formative nature of precarity and migration. Like most of us, these characters’ struggles are traceable to their childhood years.

Thanks to Savage’s sharp wit and psychological insight, the novel is ridiculously funny. Vivek and Sasha’s neurotic insecurity means they often come up short in their interpersonal lives. Vivek’s inner diatribe against his perceived cancel-jailers is particularly comedic (‘Your honour, I was a mere cog in the machine!’), as well as his intellectual envy of Sasha; sweating at the sight of his annotated textbooks like Christian Bale with his competitor’s business card in American Psycho. 

The characters self-narrate obsessively, imposing theory and structure over their experiences to affirm their identities. This distortive process is brought into focus when Sasha breaks the fourth wall: after recounting the story of ‘vulnerable little Sasha’ escaping Sarajevo and struggling to speak English, he asks us if we believe his ‘compelling story’.

Here, Savage makes an important point: that any story, while plausible, is subjective and can be crafted to suit any purpose, the stakes of which can be huge. Later, Sasha laments the perversity of history: ‘a singular, unified story’ denying ‘its slaves, its women, its subjugated; its commons: its all’. Savage’s reference to The Book of Exodus recalls Edward Said, who returned to the text’s narratorial issues throughout his career: its denial of the Canaanite perspective; and its stakes: justification for the militarised displacement and execution of Palestinians.

The Ruiners depicts a world sick with late-stage capitalism. When Charmian Clift and family moved to Greece in 1954, it was because they were ‘civilisation sick, asphalt and television sick’. Savage shows us there is no escape, no refuge from these facts. Not even on the Greek Islands. Vivek and Sasha, aspirants and over-workers, suffer flu-like bouts of illness. Pip vomits on first arrival at the house. And then there is the abject horror of the landfill, where Savage withholds nothing: ‘decades of leaching waste’, ‘oozing’; ‘leaking’ ‘toxic valley of slime, rot, death’.

Via Athenian anarchist Baselios, Savage refers to the Greek surrealist poet, Yorgos Makris, and his 1944 call to blow up the Parthenon. Makris made this artistic gesture to emphasise the suffocating, fascistic glorification of the past by the politicians of the day, who had scant regard for the present. Savage similarly highlights the absurdity of contemporary politics by leaning into the surreal. The rotting house, plague of Lobsters, toxic seas and apocalyptic skies make visual a looming man-made apocalypse: ‘our collective disinheritance’. Back home, The Ruiners puts Savage alongside writers like Alexis Wright, with her ‘hyperreal’ imagery and satire, and Melissa Lukaschenko, with her biting and defiant wit.

Alongside the dark humour and political critique, The Ruiners also contains earnest moments. A man and his dog, friendship, the comfort of reading; real attempts to understand, forgive, and love one another: ‘life was precious and stupid—we could die tomorrow from the poisoned air, or a whack on the head, so we might as well try again.’ Together, these ingredients make for a masterful, beautiful novel.

Alexandra Douvartzidis is a writer and bookseller living on Wurundjeri country. She is currently completing a Master of Creative Writing, Publishing, and Editing at The University of Melbourne.