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........

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