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Twelve-year-old Freya stays with her self-absorbed 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 weeks that ensue, they will rape her, then inter her while living, combination of unease and frustration flitting across their faces as they eventually release her from her makeshift coffin.

This could have served as the jarring main event of a novel, but it's just one of numerous terrible events in The Elements, which collects four novelettes – released 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 release has been overshadowed by the addition of Earth, the subsequent novella, on the longlist for a significant LGBTQ+ writing prize. In August, the majority other candidates pulled out in protest at the author's gender-critical views – and this year's prize has now been cancelled.

Discussion of LGBTQ+ matters is absent from The Elements, although the author touches on plenty of major issues. Homophobia, the effect of mainstream and online outlets, caregiver abandonment and sexual violence are all examined.

Distinct Accounts of Suffering

• In Water, a sorrowful woman named Willow relocates to a isolated Irish island after her husband is incarcerated for horrific crimes.
• In Earth, Evan is a footballer on legal proceedings as an accomplice to rape.
• In Fire, the mature Freya manages vengeance with her work as a doctor.
• In Air, a dad journeys to a memorial service with his adolescent son, and wonders how much to disclose about his family's history.

Trauma is piled on trauma as hurt survivors seem fated to bump into each other repeatedly for eternity

Related Narratives

Connections multiply. We first meet Evan as a boy trying to flee 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 return in homes, bars or judicial venues in another.

These narrative elements may sound complicated, but the author is skilled at how to power a narrative – his earlier acclaimed Holocaust drama has sold millions, and he has been converted into numerous languages. His businesslike prose sparkles with gripping hooks: "in the end, a doctor in the burns unit should understand more than to play with fire"; "the primary step I do when I reach the island is alter my name".

Character Development and Storytelling Strength

Characters are drawn in concise, impactful lines: the compassionate Nigerian priest, the troubled pub landlord, the daughter at conflict with her mother. Some scenes resonate with sad 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 trade barbs over cups of weak tea.

The author's knack of transporting you completely into each narrative gives the comeback of a character or plot strand from an earlier story a authentic thrill, for the initial several times at least. Yet the cumulative effect of it all is desensitizing, and at times nearly comic: suffering is piled on trauma, coincidence on chance in a grim farce in which damaged survivors seem doomed to encounter each other again and again for all time.

Conceptual Depth and Final Evaluation

If this sounds different from life and resembling limbo, that is part of the author's point. These hurt people are oppressed by the crimes they have endured, stuck in routines of thought and behavior that churn and spiral and may in turn damage others. The author has spoken about the influence of his own experiences of abuse and he depicts with compassion the way his cast navigate this dangerous landscape, reaching out for treatments – seclusion, icy sea dips, resolution or refreshing honesty – that might bring illumination.

The book's "fundamental" framing isn't particularly instructive, while the quick pace means the examination of sexual politics or online networks is mainly shallow. But while The Elements is a defective work, it's also a thoroughly engaging, victim-focused epic: a valued rebuttal to the typical preoccupation on investigators and offenders. The author illustrates how trauma can affect lives and generations, and how duration and compassion can silence its reverberations.