Ellena Savage’s snappy novel exposes a ruined utopia – but you might need a humanities degree to read it

Ellena Savage’s debut novel, The Ruiners, starts with a windfall many of us only casually dream of – A$50,000 gifted out of the blue.

It’s a financial reprieve Pip desperately needs. Savage’s 29-year-old protagonist is a disaffected waitress, haunted by the screams of the lobsters she serves each night to overbearing, bib-wearing patrons. “Mummy” is dead. Her estranged father is too. But the lump sum in his will? That’s a ticket out of lingering debt – and out of Melbourne, all the way to a “moist and mouldy” fixer-upper on the Greek island of Fokos.

Newly married, Pip and her husband, Sasha, are soon joined by their mutual friend Viv, then Viv’s co-conspirator and ex-lover. But what could otherwise loom as some kind of bohemian utopia – in the vein of Charmian Clift and George Johnston’s folkloric Hydra – rapidly loses its shine.

Review: The Ruiners – Ellena Savage (Summit Books)

Fokos, it turns out, is the site of illegal dumping. Lots of it. As Viv discovers through an underground network of concerned citizens, barrels of “corrosive waste sludge” are being “listed in the paperwork as wheat” then deposited on the island. The dumping violates “EU waste, export and environmental laws”. The contamination “would almost certainly cause illness and death”.

So far, so good – at least in narrative terms. Savage’s foray into fiction has all the makings of a literary eco-thriller. And, indeed, this is how the book is being described.

But The Ruiners is something else altogether.

Australia through a faraway lens

Blueberries, Savage’s 2020 essay collection, was praised by reviewers for its wry prose and vexed but vivid encounters with wide-ranging themes: bodies, belonging, the birth of a settler-colonial nation.

The Ruiners likewise covers vast territory.

The story is told in triptych. Each central character is restless, unsettled in – and by – the cul-de-sac of their life choices so far.

Pip and Sasha have married hurriedly after meeting at a backyard party. Sasha, nearing the end of his PhD, is testing the waters of a notoriously sparse job market. Pip is a lost sock in the tumble dryer of life, a university dropout with a bank balance once again verging on zero.

Viv, embroiled in a workers’ strike at the socialist magazine he edits, feels torn. Should he join his writers in solidarity or pursue a career-defining story that will guarantee his success as a lefty journalist? He sends for his ex, a Greek named Aggelos, whose history with Viv and Sasha runs deeper than Viv may know.

As its feverish inhabitants accumulate, the house at the centre of the novel also begins to sweat and fester – in more ways than one. Addressing themes of purpose, power and our place in a foundering world, The Ruiners is as much a character study as it is the subversive “millennial parable” it’s billed as.

The novel gnaws at a range of pressing dilemmas. Pip – “stuck, inert”, now an orphan – is unsure whether her anarchist leanings are even possible in the world she’s been “assigned at birth”. She clocks the preening Sasha as someone who positions himself “at the radical fringes of the institutions he nonetheless depended on for his identity and self-esteem”.

Viv, on the other hand, decries the internal failings of the “libtards” clogging the progressive left: their entanglement of ego with politics, altruism with neoliberal capitalism. All three characters belong to the diaspora, natural byproducts of a sprawling war machine.

Although most of its story unfolds on Fokos, The Ruiners casts an awry light on contemporary Australia – where migrants, torn from their homelands, have only reluctantly settled, where affordable housing is figment of the past and where millennial futures have been rotted by the indulgences of the post-war generation.

Clever, but dense

Much of The Ruiners is dominated by recollection and explication. Unfortunately, the density of all this backstory and meticulously chronicled tit-for-tat too often impedes the real action of the narrative.

The characters persistently tell us who they are and why – leaving few dots for the reader to connect on their own. Profound observations and glass-sharp witticisms, such as Pip’s appraisal of Sasha’s compulsive hubris, end up with little room to breathe among so much scaffolding and exposition.

In chapter 10, for example, Sasha summarises a university assignment he once wrote:

For a compulsory cultural studies module I had to take for my masters, I was required to consider ‘mass’ texts. I quietly believed that cultural studies had gone too far […] After some cajoling, my professor convinced me to write about a popular millennial New York television series whose screenplay had a literary, referential flavour to it. I contrapuntally read social alienation in the show against the post-9/11 Bush-Obama wars using my emerging thoughts about the parallel dialectics of centre/periphery and denial/truth.

This summary extends across multiple pages, including a citation of Walter Benjamin, and introduces another thicket of theorising about the common denominator among Sasha’s failed peers: believing their claims held any real power beyond securing a comfortable job in the academy.

Cleverness aside, the effect of these ruminations is stifling and at times claustrophobic. (This is not the only occasion when a character reminisces about a university assignment.) An impulse for didactic delivery results in a bloated middle that undermines the overall pace and structure of what could otherwise be a compelling narrative.