🔗 Share this article

Young Freya is visiting her distracted mother in Cornwall when she encounters teenage twins. "Nothing better than being aware of a secret," they tell her, "is having one of your own." In the weeks that ensue, they violate her, then inter her while living, a mix of anxiety and annoyance darting across their faces as they ultimately free her from her improvised coffin.

This might have stood as the shocking main event of a novel, but it's merely a single of many horrific events in The Elements, which assembles four short novels – published separately between 2023 and 2025 – in which characters confront past trauma and try to achieve peace in the present moment.

Debated Context and Subject Exploration

The book's release has been marred by the inclusion of Earth, the second novella, on the candidate list for a prominent LGBTQ+ writing prize. In August, most other contenders dropped out in objection at the author's controversial views – and this year's prize has now been cancelled.

Conversation of LGBTQ+ matters is not present from The Elements, although the author touches on plenty of major issues. LGBTQ+ discrimination, the effect of conventional and digital platforms, caregiver abandonment and sexual violence are all investigated.

Multiple Stories of Suffering

• In Water, a grieving woman named Willow relocates to a remote Irish island after her husband is incarcerated for terrible crimes.
• In Earth, Evan is a athlete on court case as an accomplice to rape.
• In Fire, the mature Freya juggles revenge with her work as a medical professional.
• In Air, a parent journeys to a burial with his teenage son, and wonders how much to reveal about his family's history.

Trauma is accumulated upon pain as hurt survivors seem doomed to bump into each other repeatedly for eternity

Related Accounts

Links multiply. We originally see Evan as a boy trying to flee the island of Water. His trial's panel contains the Freya who reappears in Fire. Aaron, the father from Air, collaborates with Freya and has a child with Willow's daughter. Supporting characters from one account return in homes, pubs or legal settings in another.

These plot threads may sound tangled, but the author is skilled at how to power a narrative – his previous successful Holocaust drama has sold millions, and he has been rendered into many languages. His straightforward prose bristles with suspenseful hooks: "ultimately, a doctor in the burns unit should understand more than to play with fire"; "the first thing I do when I come to the island is alter my name".

Character Development and Narrative Power

Characters are sketched in brief, effective lines: the empathetic Nigerian priest, the troubled pub landlord, the daughter at conflict with her mother. Some scenes resonate with tragic power or perceptive humour: a boy is hit by his father after urinating at a football match; a prejudiced island mother and her Dublin-raised neighbour exchange barbs over cups of diluted tea.

The author's knack of carrying you completely into each narrative gives the return of a character or plot strand from an prior story a genuine excitement, for the first few times at least. Yet the cumulative effect of it all is desensitizing, and at times almost comic: pain is accumulated upon suffering, chance on accident in a grim farce in which wounded survivors seem destined to encounter each other continuously for forever.

Thematic Complexity and Final Evaluation

If this sounds less like life and closer to uncertainty, that is aspect of the author's thesis. These damaged people are weighed down by the crimes they have suffered, stuck in routines of thought and behavior that churn and descend and may in turn harm others. The author has discussed about the influence of his individual experiences of mistreatment and he describes with compassion the way his characters negotiate this risky landscape, extending for treatments – isolation, cold ocean swims, reconciliation or bracing honesty – that might bring illumination.

The book's "basic" concept isn't particularly informative, while the quick pace means the examination of sexual politics or online networks is primarily surface-level. But while The Elements is a flawed work, it's also a entirely accessible, survivor-centered epic: a welcome riposte to the common fixation on investigators and perpetrators. The author illustrates how trauma can run through lives and generations, and how time and tenderness can soften its echoes.