🔗 Share this article

Twelve-year-old Freya is visiting her self-absorbed mother in Cornwall when she meets 14-year-old twins. "Nothing better than knowing a secret," they advise her, "is having one of your own." In the time that follow, they sexually assault her, then bury her alive, blend of unease and frustration darting across their faces as they finally release her from her improvised coffin.

This could have served as the shocking main event of a novel, but it's just one of numerous awful events in The Elements, which assembles four novelettes – issued separately between 2023 and 2025 – in which characters navigate past trauma and try to achieve peace in the contemporary moment.

Debated Context and Thematic Exploration

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

Conversation of trans rights is missing from The Elements, although the author touches on plenty of significant issues. Homophobia, the impact of traditional and social media, caregiver abandonment and abuse are all investigated.

Multiple Accounts of Suffering

• In Water, a mourning woman named Willow relocates to a isolated Irish island after her husband is jailed for awful crimes.
• In Earth, Evan is a soccer player on trial as an accomplice to rape.
• In Fire, the grown-up Freya juggles vengeance with her work as a surgeon.
• In Air, a dad flies to a funeral with his young son, and ponders how much to disclose about his family's past.

Trauma is piled on trauma as hurt survivors seem destined to encounter each other continuously for eternity

Interconnected Stories

Relationships proliferate. We first meet Evan as a boy trying to leave the island of Water. His trial's panel contains the Freya who reappears in Fire. Aaron, the father from Air, partners with Freya and has a child with Willow's daughter. Secondary characters from one narrative reappear in houses, bars or courtrooms in another.

These storylines may sound complicated, but the author is skilled at how to propel a narrative – his earlier popular Holocaust drama has sold millions, and he has been translated into many languages. His direct prose shines with thriller-ish hooks: "in the end, a doctor in the burns unit should understand more than to play with fire"; "the first thing I do when I reach the island is alter my name".

Character Portrayal and Storytelling Strength

Characters are drawn in concise, effective lines: the caring Nigerian priest, the troubled pub landlord, the daughter at conflict with her mother. Some scenes resonate with melancholy power or insightful humour: a boy is hit by his father after having an accident at a football match; a biased island mother and her Dublin-raised neighbour swap jabs over cups of weak tea.

The author's knack of bringing you wholeheartedly into each narrative gives the return of a character or plot strand from an prior story a real frisson, for the opening times at least. Yet the collective effect of it all is dulling, and at times nearly comic: suffering is accumulated upon trauma, coincidence on coincidence in a dark farce in which wounded survivors seem doomed to encounter each other continuously for all time.

Conceptual Complexity and Final Evaluation

If this sounds different from life and more like uncertainty, that is element of the author's point. These wounded people are burdened by the crimes they have suffered, trapped in cycles of thought and behavior that stir and spiral and may in turn harm others. The author has talked about the impact of his individual experiences of abuse and he portrays with sympathy the way his characters navigate this risky landscape, extending for solutions – solitude, cold ocean swims, reconciliation or invigorating honesty – that might provide clarity.

The book's "fundamental" structure isn't terribly educational, while the rapid pace means the examination of gender dynamics or digital platforms is mostly superficial. But while The Elements is a defective work, it's also a entirely engaging, victim-focused chronicle: a valued response to the usual obsession on detectives and perpetrators. The author illustrates how trauma can affect lives and generations, and how years and tenderness can soften its echoes.