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Twelve-year-old Freya spends time with her preoccupied mother in Cornwall when she comes across 14-year-old twins. "The only thing better than knowing a secret," they tell her, "is having one of your own." In the weeks that ensue, they will rape her, then bury her alive, combination of nervousness and annoyance passing across their faces as they ultimately liberate her from her improvised coffin.

This might have stood as the jarring focal point of a novel, but it's only one of many horrific events in The Elements, which collects four novelettes – published distinctly between 2023 and 2025 – in which characters confront past trauma and try to achieve peace in the contemporary moment.

Debated Context and Subject Exploration

The book's release has been clouded by the inclusion of Earth, the subsequent novella, on the candidate list for a significant LGBTQ+ writing prize. In August, nearly all other candidates pulled out in protest at the author's gender-critical views – and this year's prize has now been terminated.

Debate of LGBTQ+ matters is absent from The Elements, although the author addresses plenty of big issues. Homophobia, the influence of traditional and social media, parental neglect and assault are all examined.

Four Accounts of Pain

• In Water, a sorrowful woman named Willow moves to a secluded Irish island after her husband is jailed for awful crimes.
• In Earth, Evan is a footballer on legal proceedings as an participant to rape.
• In Fire, the grown-up Freya juggles vengeance with her work as a medical professional.
• In Air, a dad travels to a funeral with his teenage son, and wonders how much to reveal about his family's history.

Trauma is accumulated upon pain as damaged survivors seem destined to bump into each other again and again for all time

Interconnected Stories

Relationships multiply. We originally see Evan as a boy trying to flee the island of Water. His trial's panel contains the Freya who returns in Fire. Aaron, the father from Air, works with Freya and has a child with Willow's daughter. Secondary characters from one story return in cottages, bars or legal settings in another.

These narrative elements may sound complicated, but the author is skilled at how to propel a narrative – his earlier acclaimed Holocaust drama has sold numerous units, and he has been converted into many languages. His straightforward prose shines with suspenseful hooks: "ultimately, a doctor in the burns unit should know better than to experiment with fire"; "the initial action I do when I arrive on the island is alter my name".

Character Portrayal and Narrative Power

Characters are drawn in concise, powerful lines: the empathetic Nigerian priest, the troubled pub landlord, the daughter at conflict with her mother. Some scenes resonate with melancholy power or observational humour: a boy is struck by his father after wetting himself at a football match; a narrow-minded island mother and her Dublin-raised neighbour exchange barbs over cups of diluted tea.

The author's talent of transporting you fully into each narrative gives the return of a character or plot strand from an previous story a real frisson, for the initial several times at least. Yet the collective effect of it all is desensitizing, and at times practically comic: pain is piled on trauma, accident on coincidence in a bleak farce in which wounded survivors seem destined to bump into each other again and again for eternity.

Conceptual Complexity and Final Assessment

If this sounds different from life and more like purgatory, that is element of the author's point. These wounded people are weighed down by the crimes they have endured, caught in routines of thought and behavior that churn and spiral and may in turn damage others. The author has talked about the influence of his own experiences of mistreatment and he portrays with compassion the way his ensemble negotiate this dangerous landscape, reaching out for solutions – seclusion, cold ocean swims, reconciliation or refreshing honesty – that might let light in.

The book's "basic" structure isn't terribly informative, while the brisk pace means the discussion of gender dynamics or digital platforms is mostly shallow. But while The Elements is a defective work, it's also a completely accessible, trauma-oriented epic: a appreciated riposte to the common preoccupation on detectives and offenders. The author demonstrates how trauma can permeate lives and generations, and how time and compassion can quieten its aftereffects.