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Twelve-year-old Freya is visiting her preoccupied mother in Cornwall when she comes across teenage twins. "The only thing better than knowing a secret," they advise her, "comes from possessing one of your own." In the weeks that come after, they violate her, then bury her alive, a mix of nervousness and annoyance darting across their faces as they eventually release her from her makeshift coffin.

This may have functioned as the shocking main event of a novel, but it's merely a single of numerous awful events in The Elements, which assembles four short novels – released individually between 2023 and 2025 – in which characters confront previous suffering and try to discover peace in the current moment.

Debated Context and Subject Exploration

The book's publication has been marred by the presence of Earth, the subsequent novella, on the candidate list for a prominent LGBTQ+ writing prize. In August, nearly all other candidates pulled out in objection at the author's gender-critical views – and this year's prize has now been called off.

Debate of gender identity issues is not present from The Elements, although the author touches on plenty of significant issues. LGBTQ+ discrimination, the effect of traditional and social media, parental neglect and assault are all examined.

Distinct Narratives of Suffering

• In Water, a grieving woman named Willow moves to a remote Irish island after her husband is incarcerated for awful crimes.
• In Earth, Evan is a soccer player on legal proceedings as an participant to rape.
• In Fire, the mature Freya balances revenge with her work as a surgeon.
• In Air, a parent flies to a burial with his teenage son, and ponders how much to divulge about his family's background.

Pain is piled on suffering as hurt survivors seem doomed to meet each other repeatedly for all time

Interconnected Accounts

Connections multiply. 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, partners with Freya and has a child with Willow's daughter. Minor characters from one narrative return in cottages, bars or courtrooms in another.

These narrative elements may sound complex, but the author understands how to drive a narrative – his prior successful Holocaust drama has sold many copies, and he has been rendered into many languages. His straightforward prose shines with gripping hooks: "in the end, a doctor in the burns unit should know better than to toy with fire"; "the initial action I do when I come to the island is modify my name".

Personality Portrayal and Storytelling Strength

Characters are portrayed in concise, powerful lines: the caring Nigerian priest, the troubled pub landlord, the daughter at struggle with her mother. Some scenes echo with melancholy power or perceptive humour: a boy is hit by his father after wetting himself at a football match; a biased island mother and her Dublin-raised neighbour trade insults over cups of weak tea.

The author's ability of carrying you fully into each narrative gives the reappearance 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 desensitizing, and at times nearly comic: suffering is layered with trauma, chance on coincidence in a bleak farce in which wounded survivors seem fated to bump into each other repeatedly for all time.

Conceptual Depth and Concluding Assessment

If this sounds not exactly life and more like limbo, that is aspect of the author's message. These wounded people are burdened by the crimes they have endured, caught in cycles of thought and behavior that stir and plunge and may in turn harm others. The author has discussed about the impact of his own experiences of mistreatment and he depicts with compassion the way his characters navigate this risky landscape, extending for treatments – isolation, frigid water immersion, reconciliation or bracing honesty – that might let light in.

The book's "fundamental" framing isn't particularly informative, while the rapid pace means the examination of sexual politics or online networks is mostly superficial. But while The Elements is a imperfect work, it's also a completely readable, victim-focused chronicle: a appreciated rebuttal to the common obsession on authorities and criminals. The author demonstrates how pain can permeate lives and generations, and how years and tenderness can soften its echoes.