Young Freya stays with her preoccupied mother in Cornwall when she meets 14-year-old twins. "Nothing better than being aware of a secret," they inform her, "comes from possessing one of your own." In the weeks that ensue, they violate her, then bury her alive, blend of nervousness and annoyance darting across their faces as they ultimately liberate her from her temporary coffin.
This may have functioned as the jarring main event of a novel, but it's merely a single of multiple awful events in The Elements, which gathers four novellas – released separately between 2023 and 2025 – in which characters navigate past trauma and try to achieve peace in the current moment.
Controversial Context and Thematic Exploration
The book's publication has been clouded by the presence of Earth, the second novella, on the longlist for a significant LGBTQ+ writing prize. In August, nearly all other nominees withdrew 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 explores plenty of significant issues. LGBTQ+ discrimination, the influence of mainstream and online outlets, family disregard and sexual violence are all explored.
Multiple Stories of Pain
- In Water, a mourning woman named Willow relocates to a isolated Irish island after her husband is imprisoned for horrific crimes.
- In Earth, Evan is a soccer player on trial as an accomplice to rape.
- In Fire, the adult Freya balances retaliation with her work as a medical professional.
- In Air, a parent travels to a burial with his teenage son, and wonders how much to disclose about his family's background.
Pain is accumulated upon pain as hurt survivors seem doomed to meet each other repeatedly for eternity
Related Accounts
Connections proliferate. We originally see Evan as a boy trying to leave the island of Water. His trial's group contains the Freya who returns in Fire. Aaron, the father from Air, collaborates with Freya and has a child with Willow's daughter. Supporting characters from one story reappear in cottages, bars or courtrooms in another.
These storylines may sound tangled, but the author knows how to power a narrative – his earlier acclaimed Holocaust drama has sold millions, and he has been rendered into dozens languages. His straightforward prose bristles with gripping hooks: "in the end, a doctor in the burns unit should know better than to play with fire"; "the first thing I do when I arrive on the island is change my name".
Personality Development and Narrative Power
Characters are sketched in succinct, impactful lines: the empathetic Nigerian priest, the troubled pub landlord, the daughter at war with her mother. Some scenes ring with sad power or perceptive humour: a boy is struck by his father after urinating at a football match; a prejudiced island mother and her Dublin-raised neighbour swap insults over cups of watery tea.
The author's ability of carrying you fully into each narrative gives the return of a character or plot strand from an prior story a authentic frisson, for the initial several times at least. Yet the cumulative effect of it all is numbing, and at times practically comic: suffering is accumulated upon trauma, accident on coincidence in a grim farce in which damaged survivors seem destined to meet each other again and again for all time.
Conceptual Complexity and Final Evaluation
If this sounds less like life and more like purgatory, that is element of the author's thesis. These hurt people are weighed down by the crimes they have endured, caught in patterns of thought and behavior that agitate and spiral and may in turn harm others. The author has discussed about the impact of his individual experiences of harm and he depicts with understanding the way his ensemble negotiate this dangerous landscape, reaching out for treatments – isolation, icy sea dips, forgiveness or bracing honesty – that might bring illumination.
The book's "basic" concept isn't terribly instructive, while the quick pace means the discussion of social issues or digital platforms is mainly shallow. But while The Elements is a flawed work, it's also a completely readable, trauma-oriented saga: a valued riposte to the usual preoccupation on detectives and perpetrators. The author demonstrates how pain can run through lives and generations, and how years and tenderness can soften its aftereffects.
