🔗 Share this article

Young Freya spends time with her self-absorbed mother in Cornwall when she encounters 14-year-old twins. "Nothing better than being aware of a secret," they advise her, "is having one of your own." In the days that follow, they will rape her, then bury her alive, blend of nervousness and frustration flitting across their faces as they ultimately liberate her from her makeshift coffin.

This could have served as the disturbing centrepiece of a novel, but it's just one of many terrible events in The Elements, which assembles four novelettes – issued distinctly between 2023 and 2025 – in which characters negotiate historical pain and try to achieve peace in the contemporary moment.

Controversial Context and Thematic Exploration

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

Debate of gender identity issues is missing from The Elements, although the author addresses plenty of major issues. LGBTQ+ discrimination, the influence of mainstream and online outlets, family disregard and sexual violence are all investigated.

Multiple Narratives of Trauma

• In Water, a mourning woman named Willow moves to a remote Irish island after her husband is imprisoned for awful crimes.
• In Earth, Evan is a soccer player on legal proceedings as an accomplice to rape.
• In Fire, the mature Freya balances revenge with her work as a medical professional.
• In Air, a parent flies to a memorial service with his young son, and ponders how much to divulge about his family's past.

Trauma is accumulated upon pain as hurt survivors seem fated to meet each other repeatedly for eternity

Interconnected Stories

Links proliferate. We originally see Evan as a boy trying to leave 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 resurface in cottages, bars or judicial venues in another.

These narrative elements may sound tangled, but the author knows how to drive a narrative – his previous successful Holocaust drama has sold many copies, and he has been rendered into many languages. His direct prose shines with gripping hooks: "in the end, a doctor in the burns unit should be wiser than to experiment with fire"; "the primary step I do when I come to the island is alter my name".

Personality Portrayal and Narrative Power

Characters are sketched in succinct, effective lines: the caring Nigerian priest, the disturbed pub landlord, the daughter at conflict with her mother. Some scenes resonate with tragic power or insightful humour: a boy is struck by his father after wetting himself at a football match; a narrow-minded island mother and her Dublin-raised neighbour swap barbs over cups of watery tea.

The author's ability of bringing you completely into each narrative gives the comeback of a character or plot strand from an prior story a real frisson, for the initial several times at least. Yet the cumulative effect of it all is dulling, and at times nearly comic: trauma is layered with pain, chance on accident in a dark farce in which wounded survivors seem doomed to encounter each other continuously for all time.

Thematic Depth and Concluding Evaluation

If this sounds not exactly life and closer to uncertainty, that is element of the author's point. These damaged people are burdened by the crimes they have endured, caught in patterns of thought and behavior that churn and descend and may in turn hurt others. The author has discussed about the influence of his own experiences of mistreatment and he portrays with sympathy the way his characters navigate this perilous landscape, reaching out for solutions – seclusion, icy sea dips, resolution or bracing honesty – that might let light in.

The book's "fundamental" framing isn't extremely instructive, while the quick pace means the examination of sexual politics or social media is primarily surface-level. But while The Elements is a defective work, it's also a completely accessible, trauma-oriented chronicle: a valued rebuttal to the common preoccupation on detectives and offenders. The author shows how suffering can run through lives and generations, and how years and care can silence its echoes.