🔗 Share this article

Twelve-year-old Freya spends time with her distracted mother in Cornwall when she meets teenage twins. "Nothing better than knowing a secret," they inform her, "is having one of your own." In the weeks that ensue, they sexually assault her, then entomb her breathing, a mix of unease and annoyance darting across their faces as they finally release her from her makeshift coffin.

This might have stood as the jarring focal point of a novel, but it's only one of numerous awful events in The Elements, which assembles four novelettes – published individually between 2023 and 2025 – in which characters navigate historical pain and try to find peace in the current moment.

Debated Context and Subject Exploration

The book's issuance has been overshadowed by the addition of Earth, the subsequent novella, on the longlist for a notable LGBTQ+ writing prize. In August, most other contenders dropped out in dissent at the author's debated views – and this year's prize has now been terminated.

Debate of trans rights is missing from The Elements, although the author addresses plenty of big issues. Homophobia, the impact of traditional and social media, family disregard and assault are all examined.

Multiple Accounts of Trauma

• In Water, a mourning woman named Willow transfers to a remote Irish island after her husband is incarcerated for awful crimes.
• In Earth, Evan is a athlete on legal proceedings as an accomplice to rape.
• In Fire, the adult Freya balances revenge with her work as a medical professional.
• In Air, a parent travels to a memorial service with his adolescent son, and ponders how much to reveal about his family's background.

Pain is layered with suffering as wounded survivors seem fated to bump into each other again and again for eternity

Interconnected Narratives

Links proliferate. We first meet Evan as a boy trying to flee the island of Water. His trial's jury contains the Freya who reappears in Fire. Aaron, the father from Air, collaborates with Freya and has a child with Willow's daughter. Minor characters from one narrative return in homes, taverns or legal settings in another.

These plot threads may sound complicated, but the author knows how to power a narrative – his earlier successful Holocaust drama has sold millions, and he has been rendered into many languages. His direct prose sparkles with thriller-ish hooks: "ultimately, a doctor in the burns unit should know better than to experiment with fire"; "the first thing I do when I come to the island is change my name".

Character Development and Storytelling Power

Characters are sketched in brief, powerful lines: the compassionate Nigerian priest, the disturbed pub landlord, the daughter at war with her mother. Some scenes ring with melancholy power or insightful humour: a boy is punched by his father after wetting himself at a football match; a narrow-minded island mother and her Dublin-raised neighbour trade insults over cups of diluted tea.

The author's ability of carrying you completely into each narrative gives the comeback of a character or plot strand from an previous story a genuine frisson, for the initial several times at least. Yet the cumulative effect of it all is desensitizing, and at times almost comic: suffering is layered with pain, accident on coincidence in a dark farce in which wounded survivors seem doomed to encounter each other continuously for forever.

Thematic Depth and Final Assessment

If this sounds not exactly life and resembling uncertainty, that is aspect of the author's thesis. These damaged people are burdened by the crimes they have experienced, stuck in routines of thought and behavior that churn and plunge and may in turn hurt others. The author has discussed about the effect of his individual experiences of mistreatment and he depicts with understanding the way his characters negotiate this risky landscape, reaching out for remedies – solitude, icy sea dips, reconciliation or invigorating honesty – that might let light in.

The book's "fundamental" structure isn't extremely instructive, while the brisk pace means the discussion of sexual politics or social media is mostly shallow. But while The Elements is a defective work, it's also a entirely accessible, survivor-centered epic: a valued riposte to the common preoccupation on investigators and offenders. The author illustrates how pain can run through lives and generations, and how time and care can soften its echoes.