Fifty thousand dollars drops into your lap thanks to the will of your absent, now dead, father. You are 29, alone, unknown to yourself and perplexed in every sense of your life. Soon, you meet a man, and he is charming, impulsive, intellectual and freewheeling. After a few months of dating, he asks you to move to Greece, buy a house, get married and start a life with him on an island where barely a soul breathes. What do you do? Do you mistake recklessness for adventure? A cute romance for lasting love? Do you spend all your inheritance on a decrepit house in the middle of nowhere? Well, these are precisely the questions asked of the protagonist in The Ruiners.

Ellena Savage’s highly anticipated debut novel, The Ruiners, revolves around love, lust and the remnants people leave behind, both within the world and within one another. Savage is the acclaimed author of Blueberries, an essay collection that received brilliant reviews. In shifting to the novel form, Savage questions what we inherit from the planet and scrutinizes what we give in return, weaving between themes of love, climate and capitalism. While these ideas are compelling, the novel is unfortunately far less convincing.

The novel follows Pip, who, after inheriting her absent father’s wealth, abandons her life as a hospitality worker in Melbourne to follow her boyfriend, Sasha, to Fokos, a rustic Greek island. Their love is framed as a once-in-a-lifetime connection, an opportunity for intimacy that must be taken now and will never come by again. However, the narrative mistakes chaos for depth, lust for love and heedlessness for freedom. 

Pip is uncertain of who she is. She’s dissatisfied and longs to escape her current life but lacks direction. Undoubtedly ambitious, Pip remains passive and takes no action to achieve her vision. I am all for flawed main characters, provided their flaws contribute to meaningful growth. But here, Pip’s journey felt pitiful due to her codependency on Sasha. Her character had potential for a riveting transformation. Instead, the author latches the character of Pip onto a partner and reconstructs her identity through another’s worldview, ideologies and ambitions. What could have been a critical analysis of Pip’s self-erasure turned out to be more of an endorsement of her passionate yet toxic romance. The novel barely taps into Pip’s recovery from her loss of identity.

The book involves other characters including Viv, Pip’s best friend, and Viv’s ex-lover, Aggelos. The narrative point of view shifts from Pip to Viv to Sasha, which enabled Savage to examine each character’s internal conflicts, hidden insecurities and the relations they believe to share with the others. However, the fast-paced structure strips each character of plausible growth. The introspection rarely lingers long enough to explore each character’s emotional development and moments of self-discovery. The author hops across crucial moments of identity and consequence, which left me frustrated and disconnected rather than invested. 

Furthermore, the climate fiction aspects felt forced and hurried rather than naturally merged into the storyline. Fokos functioned as a dumping ground for Europe’s waste, which lent a sinister realism to the plot, yet the novel treats this environmental threat as somewhat of a backdrop. The introduction of political commentary is abrupt and overly explicit, leaving no space for a reader to engage. I enjoy nuanced stories that unravel slowly yet gracefully, not stories that hand over everything on a platter.

The novel chose to tackle multiple themes but ultimately ended up doing a mediocre job with each of them. Amalgamating such complex themes is undoubtedly a difficult task. Nevertheless, as a reader, I would much rather have a book focus on one or two central ideas and explore them meticulously than attempt to integrate numerous themes and, in doing so, fail to provide justice to even one.