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Young Freya spends time with her preoccupied mother in Cornwall when she comes across teenage twins. "Nothing better than knowing a secret," they tell her, "is having one of your own." In the time that come after, they will rape her, then inter her while living, blend of anxiety and annoyance flitting across their faces as they eventually release her from her improvised coffin.

This could have served as the jarring centrepiece of a novel, but it's just one of numerous horrific events in The Elements, which gathers four novelettes – issued distinctly between 2023 and 2025 – in which characters confront past trauma and try to discover peace in the present moment.

Controversial Context and Subject Exploration

The book's release has been clouded by the inclusion of Earth, the second novella, on the preliminary list for a significant LGBTQ+ writing prize. In August, most other candidates dropped out in protest at the author's gender-critical views – and this year's prize has now been called off.

Conversation of gender identity issues is missing from The Elements, although the author explores plenty of big issues. LGBTQ+ discrimination, the effect of traditional and social media, caregiver abandonment and assault are all examined.

Four Narratives of Pain

• In Water, a sorrowful woman named Willow relocates to a secluded Irish island after her husband is imprisoned for awful crimes.
• In Earth, Evan is a athlete on trial as an accessory to rape.
• In Fire, the grown-up Freya juggles revenge with her work as a doctor.
• In Air, a father travels to a funeral with his adolescent son, and considers how much to divulge about his family's background.

Trauma is layered with pain as damaged survivors seem fated to meet each other continuously for all time

Linked Accounts

Links proliferate. We first meet Evan as a boy trying to flee the island of Water. His trial's jury contains the Freya who reappears in Fire. Aaron, the father from Air, works with Freya and has a child with Willow's daughter. Minor characters from one narrative reappear in cottages, pubs or legal settings in another.

These plot threads may sound complicated, but the author understands how to power a narrative – his prior acclaimed Holocaust drama has sold numerous units, and he has been converted into numerous languages. His straightforward prose shines with suspenseful hooks: "after all, a doctor in the burns unit should be wiser than to play with fire"; "the primary step I do when I come to the island is alter my name".

Character Development and Storytelling Strength

Characters are sketched in brief, effective lines: the caring Nigerian priest, the disturbed pub landlord, the daughter at war with her mother. Some scenes ring with tragic power or perceptive humour: a boy is hit by his father after urinating at a football match; a biased island mother and her Dublin-raised neighbour exchange insults over cups of weak tea.

The author's knack of carrying you wholeheartedly into each narrative gives the return of a character or plot strand from an prior story a authentic excitement, for the opening times at least. Yet the aggregate effect of it all is numbing, and at times almost comic: trauma is piled on pain, chance on accident in a bleak farce in which wounded survivors seem destined to encounter each other continuously for forever.

Thematic Depth and Concluding Evaluation

If this sounds different from life and resembling limbo, that is element of the author's point. These hurt people are burdened by the crimes they have experienced, caught in routines of thought and behavior that agitate and spiral and may in turn damage others. The author has spoken about the effect of his personal experiences of mistreatment and he depicts with sympathy the way his characters navigate this dangerous landscape, reaching out for solutions – seclusion, icy sea dips, resolution or invigorating honesty – that might bring illumination.

The book's "fundamental" structure isn't extremely informative, while the brisk pace means the discussion of sexual politics or digital platforms is primarily surface-level. But while The Elements is a defective work, it's also a thoroughly readable, survivor-centered saga: a appreciated riposte to the usual fixation on detectives and perpetrators. The author shows how suffering can permeate lives and generations, and how duration and care can silence its echoes.