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Twelve-year-old Freya stays with her preoccupied mother in Cornwall when she encounters 14-year-old twins. "The only thing better than being aware of a secret," they advise her, "is having one of your own." In the weeks that follow, they sexually assault her, then inter her while living, a mix of unease and irritation darting across their faces as they ultimately liberate her from her makeshift coffin.

This may have functioned as the disturbing centrepiece of a novel, but it's only one of multiple terrible events in The Elements, which gathers four novellas – issued distinctly between 2023 and 2025 – in which characters negotiate past trauma and try to achieve peace in the current moment.

Controversial Context and Thematic Exploration

The book's issuance has been clouded by the presence of Earth, the second novella, on the candidate list for a significant LGBTQ+ writing prize. In August, the majority other candidates withdrew in dissent at the author's gender-critical views – and this year's prize has now been cancelled.

Conversation of gender identity issues is absent from The Elements, although the author touches on plenty of significant issues. Homophobia, the effect of mainstream and online outlets, caregiver abandonment and assault are all examined.

Distinct Stories of Trauma

• In Water, a sorrowful woman named Willow moves to a secluded Irish island after her husband is imprisoned for awful crimes.
• In Earth, Evan is a soccer player on court case as an accessory to rape.
• In Fire, the mature Freya juggles vengeance with her work as a doctor.
• In Air, a father flies to a burial with his adolescent son, and ponders how much to disclose about his family's background.

Suffering is piled on trauma as wounded survivors seem destined to meet each other repeatedly for all time

Linked Narratives

Relationships proliferate. We originally see 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 cottages, taverns or legal settings in another.

These narrative elements may sound tangled, but the author understands how to propel a narrative – his earlier successful Holocaust drama has sold millions, and he has been converted into numerous languages. His direct prose bristles with suspenseful hooks: "ultimately, a doctor in the burns unit should know better than to play with fire"; "the initial action I do when I come to the island is change my name".

Character Development and Storytelling Power

Characters are sketched in succinct, powerful lines: the caring Nigerian priest, the disturbed pub landlord, the daughter at struggle with her mother. Some scenes ring with sad power or insightful humour: a boy is hit by his father after urinating at a football match; a prejudiced island mother and her Dublin-raised neighbour trade jabs over cups of watery tea.

The author's talent of carrying you fully into each narrative gives the comeback of a character or plot strand from an previous story a real excitement, for the opening times at least. Yet the aggregate effect of it all is numbing, and at times practically comic: pain is accumulated upon trauma, coincidence on coincidence in a dark farce in which damaged survivors seem doomed to bump into each other repeatedly for all time.

Thematic Complexity and Concluding Evaluation

If this sounds less like life and closer to limbo, that is aspect of the author's point. These hurt people are weighed down by the crimes they have suffered, caught in patterns of thought and behavior that agitate and spiral and may in turn hurt others. The author has talked about the influence of his own experiences of harm and he describes with compassion the way his cast traverse this risky landscape, striving for remedies – seclusion, cold ocean swims, forgiveness or refreshing honesty – that might bring illumination.

The book's "fundamental" concept isn't terribly instructive, while the quick pace means the examination of gender dynamics or online networks is primarily superficial. But while The Elements is a imperfect work, it's also a entirely accessible, victim-focused epic: a appreciated rebuttal to the typical fixation on investigators and criminals. The author illustrates how suffering can run through lives and generations, and how time and compassion can soften its reverberations.