🔗 Share this article

Twelve-year-old Freya spends time with her preoccupied mother in Cornwall when she comes across teenage twins. "Nothing better than being aware of a secret," they advise her, "is having one of your own." In the days that come after, they violate her, then bury her alive, a mix of nervousness and frustration passing across their faces as they eventually release her from her improvised coffin.

This may have functioned as the disturbing focal point of a novel, but it's just one of numerous terrible events in The Elements, which assembles four novellas – published distinctly between 2023 and 2025 – in which characters navigate previous suffering and try to discover peace in the contemporary moment.

Debated Context and Subject Exploration

The book's publication has been clouded by the inclusion of Earth, the subsequent novella, on the preliminary list for a prominent LGBTQ+ writing prize. In August, most other nominees withdrew in protest at the author's debated views – and this year's prize has now been called off.

Debate of LGBTQ+ matters is missing from The Elements, although the author explores plenty of significant issues. Anti-gay prejudice, the effect of conventional and digital platforms, caregiver abandonment and assault are all investigated.

Multiple Narratives of Suffering

• In Water, a sorrowful woman named Willow transfers to a isolated Irish island after her husband is jailed for terrible crimes.
• In Earth, Evan is a athlete on legal proceedings as an accessory to rape.
• In Fire, the adult Freya manages vengeance with her work as a surgeon.
• In Air, a parent travels to a funeral with his teenage son, and considers how much to disclose about his family's history.

Suffering is layered with pain as wounded survivors seem destined to bump into each other repeatedly for all time

Related Narratives

Connections proliferate. We initially encounter Evan as a boy trying to escape the island of Water. His trial's jury contains the Freya who returns in Fire. Aaron, the father from Air, works with Freya and has a child with Willow's daughter. Supporting characters from one account return in cottages, bars or courtrooms in another.

These plot threads may sound complex, but the author understands how to power a narrative – his earlier popular Holocaust drama has sold millions, and he has been rendered into dozens languages. His direct prose shines with thriller-ish hooks: "after all, a doctor in the burns unit should be wiser than to play with fire"; "the first thing I do when I reach the island is modify my name".

Personality Portrayal and Storytelling Power

Characters are portrayed in brief, powerful lines: the compassionate Nigerian priest, the troubled pub landlord, the daughter at struggle with her mother. Some scenes echo with tragic power or perceptive humour: a boy is hit by his father after having an accident at a football match; a prejudiced island mother and her Dublin-raised neighbour trade insults over cups of watery tea.

The author's talent of carrying you completely into each narrative gives the reappearance of a character or plot strand from an earlier story a authentic frisson, for the opening times at least. Yet the aggregate effect of it all is dulling, and at times practically comic: pain is piled on pain, accident on coincidence in a dark farce in which wounded survivors seem destined to encounter each other again and again for eternity.

Conceptual Complexity and Final Evaluation

If this sounds not exactly life and resembling purgatory, that is part of the author's message. These damaged people are weighed down by the crimes they have endured, stuck in patterns 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 cast traverse this dangerous landscape, reaching out for treatments – seclusion, cold ocean swims, resolution or invigorating honesty – that might bring illumination.

The book's "fundamental" structure isn't extremely instructive, while the quick pace means the examination of sexual politics or digital platforms is mostly shallow. But while The Elements is a defective work, it's also a entirely readable, trauma-oriented saga: a welcome riposte to the common obsession on investigators and perpetrators. The author shows how suffering can permeate lives and generations, and how years and tenderness can soften its echoes.