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Young Freya stays with her preoccupied mother in Cornwall when she encounters 14-year-old twins. "Nothing better than being aware of a secret," they advise her, "is having one of your own." In the time that follow, they violate her, then entomb her breathing, combination of nervousness and frustration passing across their faces as they finally release her from her improvised coffin.

This may have functioned as the shocking centrepiece of a novel, but it's just one of numerous terrible events in The Elements, which gathers four short novels – released distinctly between 2023 and 2025 – in which characters confront past trauma and try to achieve peace in the current moment.

Disputed Context and Subject Exploration

The book's release has been overshadowed by the inclusion of Earth, the subsequent novella, on the longlist for a significant LGBTQ+ writing prize. In August, nearly all other contenders pulled out in dissent at the author's controversial views – and this year's prize has now been called off.

Conversation of gender identity issues is missing from The Elements, although the author addresses plenty of significant issues. Anti-gay prejudice, the impact of conventional and digital platforms, caregiver abandonment and abuse are all explored.

Multiple Accounts of Pain

• In Water, a mourning woman named Willow relocates to a remote Irish island after her husband is incarcerated for horrific crimes.
• In Earth, Evan is a athlete on trial as an accomplice to rape.
• In Fire, the mature Freya juggles revenge with her work as a doctor.
• In Air, a father flies to a burial with his young son, and considers how much to divulge about his family's past.

Trauma is accumulated upon pain as damaged survivors seem destined to encounter each other again and again for forever

Interconnected Narratives

Relationships proliferate. We first meet Evan as a boy trying to escape 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. Supporting characters from one account return in cottages, taverns or legal settings in another.

These storylines may sound complicated, but the author is skilled at how to propel a narrative – his previous successful Holocaust drama has sold numerous units, and he has been rendered into numerous languages. His direct prose sparkles with gripping hooks: "in the end, a doctor in the burns unit should know better than to experiment with fire"; "the primary step I do when I reach the island is alter my name".

Character Portrayal and Storytelling Power

Characters are sketched in brief, effective lines: the empathetic Nigerian priest, the troubled pub landlord, the daughter at conflict with her mother. Some scenes ring with melancholy power or insightful humour: a boy is hit by his father after wetting himself at a football match; a prejudiced island mother and her Dublin-raised neighbour trade barbs over cups of weak tea.

The author's knack of transporting you wholeheartedly into each narrative gives the comeback of a character or plot strand from an prior story a real thrill, for the opening times at least. Yet the aggregate effect of it all is desensitizing, and at times practically comic: trauma is layered with trauma, coincidence on coincidence in a bleak farce in which wounded survivors seem doomed to meet each other repeatedly for all time.

Conceptual Depth and Final Assessment

If this sounds different from life and more like purgatory, that is aspect of the author's thesis. These damaged people are oppressed by the crimes they have suffered, caught in cycles of thought and behavior that agitate and descend and may in turn harm others. The author has spoken about the influence of his own experiences of mistreatment and he describes with understanding the way his cast traverse this perilous landscape, striving for remedies – seclusion, frigid water immersion, forgiveness or bracing honesty – that might provide clarity.

The book's "elemental" concept isn't particularly instructive, while the quick pace means the examination of social issues or online networks is primarily surface-level. But while The Elements is a defective work, it's also a entirely accessible, trauma-oriented chronicle: a appreciated rebuttal to the usual preoccupation on authorities and criminals. The author shows how pain can affect lives and generations, and how duration and care can quieten its aftereffects.