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Young Freya is visiting her preoccupied mother in Cornwall when she comes across 14-year-old twins. "The only thing better than knowing a secret," they advise her, "is having one of your own." In the weeks that ensue, they violate her, then bury her alive, blend of unease and irritation flitting across their faces as they finally liberate her from her improvised coffin.

This could have served as the shocking centrepiece of a novel, but it's only one of multiple awful events in The Elements, which assembles four short novels – issued distinctly between 2023 and 2025 – in which characters navigate past trauma and try to find peace in the contemporary moment.

Controversial Context and Subject Exploration

The book's publication has been overshadowed by the inclusion of Earth, the second novella, on the preliminary list for a significant LGBTQ+ writing prize. In August, most other nominees withdrew in protest at the author's gender-critical views – and this year's prize has now been cancelled.

Debate of LGBTQ+ matters is absent from The Elements, although the author touches on plenty of major issues. LGBTQ+ discrimination, the influence of traditional and social media, family disregard and abuse are all investigated.

Distinct Accounts of Pain

• In Water, a grieving woman named Willow relocates to a remote Irish island after her husband is imprisoned for terrible crimes.
• In Earth, Evan is a footballer on legal proceedings as an participant to rape.
• In Fire, the mature Freya manages retaliation with her work as a medical professional.
• In Air, a father flies to a funeral with his adolescent son, and wonders how much to divulge about his family's background.

Pain is piled on suffering as damaged survivors seem doomed to encounter each other repeatedly for forever

Interconnected Accounts

Connections multiply. We initially encounter Evan as a boy trying to leave the island of Water. His trial's group contains the Freya who shows up again in Fire. Aaron, the father from Air, works with Freya and has a child with Willow's daughter. Minor characters from one narrative return in homes, bars or judicial venues in another.

These storylines may sound complex, but the author knows how to propel a narrative – his earlier successful Holocaust drama has sold millions, and he has been translated into dozens languages. His businesslike prose shines with thriller-ish hooks: "ultimately, a doctor in the burns unit should know better than to toy with fire"; "the primary step I do when I arrive on the island is alter my name".

Personality Portrayal and Storytelling Strength

Characters are sketched in concise, effective lines: the compassionate Nigerian priest, the troubled pub landlord, the daughter at war with her mother. Some scenes echo with melancholy power or observational humour: a boy is struck by his father after urinating at a football match; a prejudiced island mother and her Dublin-raised neighbour swap barbs over cups of diluted tea.

The author's ability of transporting you wholeheartedly into each narrative gives the comeback of a character or plot strand from an previous story a genuine frisson, for the first few times at least. Yet the cumulative effect of it all is numbing, and at times almost comic: suffering is piled on trauma, accident on chance in a bleak farce in which wounded survivors seem doomed to meet each other continuously for all time.

Conceptual Depth and Final Evaluation

If this sounds different from life and more like uncertainty, that is part of the author's thesis. These damaged people are weighed down by the crimes they have suffered, trapped in routines of thought and behavior that churn and spiral and may in turn damage others. The author has talked about the impact of his personal experiences of abuse and he depicts with compassion the way his characters traverse this risky landscape, reaching out for treatments – seclusion, frigid water immersion, reconciliation or invigorating honesty – that might provide clarity.

The book's "elemental" structure isn't extremely informative, while the brisk pace means the discussion of gender dynamics or online networks is mainly shallow. But while The Elements is a defective work, it's also a thoroughly engaging, survivor-centered chronicle: a appreciated response to the usual obsession on authorities and criminals. The author demonstrates how suffering can run through lives and generations, and how years and care can quieten its aftereffects.