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Twelve-year-old Freya is visiting her distracted mother in Cornwall when she comes across 14-year-old twins. "Nothing better than knowing a secret," they tell her, "is having one of your own." In the days that ensue, they will rape her, then entomb her breathing, blend of anxiety and irritation passing across their faces as they finally liberate her from her temporary coffin.

This could have served as the jarring centrepiece of a novel, but it's just one of multiple terrible events in The Elements, which collects four novellas – issued individually between 2023 and 2025 – in which characters navigate previous suffering and try to find peace in the contemporary moment.

Disputed Context and Thematic Exploration

The book's issuance has been clouded by the inclusion of Earth, the subsequent novella, on the candidate list for a notable LGBTQ+ writing prize. In August, nearly all other contenders pulled out in dissent at the author's debated views – and this year's prize has now been cancelled.

Debate of trans rights is absent from The Elements, although the author explores plenty of major issues. Homophobia, the effect of conventional and digital platforms, parental neglect and sexual violence are all investigated.

Four Stories of Pain

• In Water, a mourning woman named Willow moves to a isolated Irish island after her husband is imprisoned for terrible crimes.
• In Earth, Evan is a footballer on legal proceedings as an accomplice to rape.
• In Fire, the mature Freya manages revenge with her work as a surgeon.
• In Air, a father journeys to a memorial service with his young son, and considers how much to reveal about his family's background.

Pain is piled on suffering as hurt survivors seem destined to bump into each other again and again for all time

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Relationships proliferate. We originally see Evan as a boy trying to flee the island of Water. His trial's panel contains the Freya who shows up again in Fire. Aaron, the father from Air, partners with Freya and has a child with Willow's daughter. Secondary characters from one account resurface in homes, pubs or courtrooms in another.

These narrative elements may sound complicated, but the author is skilled at how to power a narrative – his previous successful Holocaust drama has sold numerous units, and he has been translated into numerous languages. His straightforward prose shines with thriller-ish hooks: "after all, a doctor in the burns unit should know better than to toy with fire"; "the first thing I do when I arrive on the island is change my name".

Personality Portrayal and Storytelling Strength

Characters are sketched in concise, effective lines: the compassionate Nigerian priest, the disturbed pub landlord, the daughter at struggle with her mother. Some scenes ring with melancholy power or perceptive humour: a boy is punched by his father after urinating at a football match; a biased island mother and her Dublin-raised neighbour swap jabs over cups of diluted tea.

The author's knack of carrying you wholeheartedly into each narrative gives the comeback of a character or plot strand from an prior story a genuine excitement, for the opening times at least. Yet the collective effect of it all is numbing, and at times almost comic: suffering is piled on trauma, chance on coincidence in a dark farce in which wounded survivors seem fated to meet each other again and again for eternity.

Thematic Complexity and Concluding Assessment

If this sounds less like life and more like purgatory, that is element of the author's message. These damaged people are oppressed by the crimes they have endured, trapped in routines of thought and behavior that stir and plunge and may in turn damage others. The author has talked about the impact of his individual experiences of harm and he describes with understanding the way his ensemble navigate this perilous landscape, striving for treatments – isolation, icy sea dips, forgiveness or refreshing honesty – that might provide clarity.

The book's "elemental" concept isn't particularly instructive, while the rapid pace means the exploration of sexual politics or social media is primarily shallow. But while The Elements is a defective work, it's also a entirely readable, trauma-oriented epic: a valued response to the usual obsession on authorities and criminals. The author demonstrates how pain can run through lives and generations, and how years and care can soften its reverberations.