🔗 Share this article

Young Freya spends time with her distracted mother in Cornwall when she encounters teenage twins. "The only thing better than being aware of a secret," they advise her, "is having one of your own." In the days that ensue, they violate her, then bury her alive, blend of unease and frustration flitting across their faces as they eventually free her from her makeshift coffin.

This may have functioned as the disturbing main event of a novel, but it's merely a single of numerous terrible events in The Elements, which collects four short novels – published individually between 2023 and 2025 – in which characters negotiate previous suffering and try to find peace in the contemporary moment.

Controversial Context and Subject Exploration

The book's publication has been overshadowed by the inclusion of Earth, the second novella, on the preliminary list for a notable LGBTQ+ writing prize. In August, nearly all other contenders dropped out in dissent at the author's gender-critical views – and this year's prize has now been called off.

Debate of trans rights is absent from The Elements, although the author touches on plenty of major issues. Anti-gay prejudice, the influence of traditional and social media, parental neglect and sexual violence are all explored.

Distinct Accounts of Pain

• In Water, a mourning woman named Willow transfers to a remote Irish island after her husband is jailed for terrible crimes.
• In Earth, Evan is a athlete on legal proceedings as an participant to rape.
• In Fire, the adult Freya juggles retaliation with her work as a doctor.
• In Air, a father travels to a memorial service with his teenage son, and considers how much to disclose about his family's past.

Trauma is accumulated upon suffering as hurt survivors seem doomed to encounter each other repeatedly for all time

Interconnected Accounts

Links proliferate. We first meet 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, collaborates with Freya and has a child with Willow's daughter. Minor characters from one story resurface in houses, bars or courtrooms in another.

These storylines may sound tangled, but the author knows how to propel a narrative – his earlier popular Holocaust drama has sold many copies, and he has been rendered into many languages. His straightforward prose sparkles with gripping hooks: "in the end, 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 modify my name".

Personality Portrayal and Storytelling Power

Characters are portrayed in concise, impactful lines: the caring Nigerian priest, the troubled pub landlord, the daughter at conflict with her mother. Some scenes echo with melancholy power or insightful humour: a boy is punched by his father after having an accident at a football match; a narrow-minded island mother and her Dublin-raised neighbour swap insults over cups of diluted tea.

The author's ability of bringing you wholeheartedly into each narrative gives the return of a character or plot strand from an earlier story a authentic frisson, for the opening times at least. Yet the cumulative effect of it all is desensitizing, and at times practically comic: pain is accumulated upon suffering, chance on coincidence in a grim farce in which wounded survivors seem fated to bump into each other continuously for all time.

Conceptual Complexity and Concluding Assessment

If this sounds less like life and resembling limbo, that is part of the author's message. These damaged people are oppressed by the crimes they have experienced, caught in routines of thought and behavior that stir and spiral and may in turn hurt others. The author has talked about the effect of his personal experiences of harm and he depicts with understanding the way his characters navigate this perilous landscape, reaching out for treatments – seclusion, icy sea dips, resolution or refreshing honesty – that might provide clarity.

The book's "fundamental" concept isn't extremely educational, while the brisk pace means the examination of gender dynamics or online networks is mostly shallow. But while The Elements is a defective work, it's also a completely readable, trauma-oriented saga: a appreciated response to the typical fixation on authorities and offenders. The author shows how trauma can run through lives and generations, and how duration and tenderness can quieten its aftereffects.