The Elements

by John Boyne

John Boyne's 15th novel for adults is one of his finest yet, a masterful compilation of four distinct yet related stories that tackle the weighty issue of sexual abuse in modern times from multiple perspectives. Which is not to suggest it is a mystery or thriller, though it contains elements of both, nor an imagining of one event as seen through multiple points of view; instead, in Boyne's skilled hands, The Elements is a kaleidoscopic literary novel that examines the far-reaching ripple effect of sexual violence as understood by characters with varying relationships to it: as enabler, accomplice, predator, and victim.

Originally published in Boyne's native Ireland and the United Kingdom as four standalone novellas, the four stories in The Elements are at once self-contained and interconnected, with a character from each pulled forward as the narrator of the subsequent story. In "Water," a well-to-do wife and mother from Dublin re-christens herself as Willow Hale, following the collapse of her orderly world. Fleeing Dublin for a coastal island with a population numbering in the hundreds, Willow mourns the death of one daughter and estrangement from another while raging against her soon-to-be-ex-husband for the crimes he committed against students in his care. A young boy from the island eventually flees for mainland Ireland, becoming the narrator of "Earth." Evan dreams of becoming an artist but is forced to use his body to support himself: first as a farmhand, then in the beds of older men, then as a star soccer player. "I was reared in the mud and the dirt," he notes, and yet winds up in a high-rise apartment, deep in unrequited love for his straight best friend and with a highly questionable understanding of consent. In "Fire," Boyne boldly takes readers into the mind of Freya, a surgeon who works with fire victims, as she carefully selects young boys to coax back to her apartment. One of those boys, Aaron, re-appears as the narrator of "Air," now the father of a recalcitrant teenager forced to fly halfway across the world to visit his grieving mother on that same sparsely populated island off the coast of Ireland. His mother, filled with despair when she first lived on the island, lamented: "The elements--water, earth, fire, air--are our greatest friends, our animators. They feed us, warm us, give us life, and yet conspire to kill us at every juncture."

Boyne has spoken publicly about his own experience of abuse as a young man, and called the writing of this novel both "dark" and "cathartic." It's an experience that is paralleled as a reader; The Elements is difficult to read and equally difficult to put down once begun. Each story is compelling in its own right, probing questions of complicity and power, storytelling and secrets, the lies we tell each other and the lies we tell ourselves. Taken together, the four combine into a powerful and moving examination of what it means to be human. Can one be complicit in and party to and victim of violence, sometimes all at once? Where is the line between understandable and unforgivable, and what happens when that line is crossed? Boyne probes the inner worlds of narrators living within this complexity and violence, and also with a desire for justice and love. Willow, on seeing Evan fleeing the small island that raised him harshly, reflects, "I hope that he will not know pain or betrayal or disappointment, but of course he will, because he's alive and that's the price we pay." The Elements honors this reality while also holding that these pains are not all that exists.

Making small talk with a writer at a party, the narrator of "Air" questions the author about happy endings. Her take is that the happy ending is not necessary for the characters--but that "readers need to feel that there's hope. For them." This same could said of The Elements itself: Boyne may not offer happy endings as we traditionally understand them, but does not leave readers without hope--for themselves. He skillfully brings each story back around by the end to tie up some loose ends and offer brief glimmers into the outcomes of characters left behind. In these glimmers, The Elements manages to offer readers the same hope Aaron's author friend envisions. Through each of these four narrators--themselves often unreliable in accounting for their own actions--the novel invites readers into a place of nuance and complexity, where right and wrong collide and intertwine and don't always fade back to black and white. Brutal, honest, and masterfully crafted from start to finish, The Elements is a literary feat from one of Ireland's most beloved contemporary writers. --Kerry McHugh

John Boyne (photo: Rich Gilligan)

John Boyne has written more than two dozen novels, including the widely acclaimed The Heart's Invisible Furies and A Ladder to the Sky, and the young adult novel The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which has been adapted for film, theater, ballet, and opera performances. His 15th novel for adults, The Elements, weaves together four interconnected stories in a dark and powerful work exploring sexual abuse from varied perspectives. It will be published by Holt on September 9, 2025. Boyne lives and writes in Ireland.

This book has both difficult subject matter and a unique structure. How do you talk about it, when talking to others?

The idea, at the start, was that there would be four standalone stories, with a character from one becoming the narrator of the next one. But they would be connected by this theme of sexual abuse, and I would work from the enabler to the accomplice to the perpetrator to the victim in four separate narratives. So it's a novel which contains those four connected stories, all on the same theme, with characters that drift in and out. And ultimately, it works in a cyclical way back to the place where it started.

It was an interesting twist, to end up--at least in terms of setting--back where the novel begins.

This is a particularly long book when you put all four stories together, and I liked the idea of wrapping up some of the loose ends. The fourth story, "Air," is mostly set on a plane, and when I thought about where I would send that plane, it felt like the place to finish was to go back to the island that features in the beginning in "Water." The island isn't named in the book, though it's somewhat based on one of the small Aran Islands off the West Coast of Galway.

I visited a Gaeltacht [an Irish-language district] on those islands when I was a teenager, and with only about 400 residents, not much Wi-Fi, it feels removed from the world. In that way, the island is similar to the airplane: two people stuck together, with not many others around them but not entirely alone, either.

Outside of the United States and Canada, these four stories were published as standalone novellas prior to being published as The Elements. What was it like for you to be writing the later stories after the earlier ones were already out in the world?

I started with "Water," and presented it to my U.K. editor with the idea that I had that I wanted to write each of the four elements, one every six months or so, published as a small hardback. That's how it started; "Water" was published while I was still writing the third, "Fire." Which meant I had to live with everything I had written so far. Like serialized authors in the 19th century: once you've committed to something in print, there's no going back and rewriting it. That was a challenge--quite a nice challenge as a writer--as it wasn't something I'd done before.

Your past works span a wide range of time periods and themes. Was the research process much different for this book, given the very contemporary setting? Did it feel different to be writing in the present day than your more historical novels?

This was probably the most emotional, with the possible exception of The Heart's Invisible Furies. And it was easily the most difficult, particularly when writing "Fire" and keeping the voice of Freya as an abuser in my head.

Many have said that this novel is very dark, and it is, but at the same time, something that is dark to write can still, in a weird way, be enjoyable. You can still leave your computer every evening and feel that you're achieving something, that the story is moving along, that there is authenticity in the characters, that there is a story to be told and you are the person to tell it. I like the writing process, but with this one, I'll be honest and say that when I got to the end of the whole thing, what I felt was a sense of relief. Partially in finishing, but also in feeling like now I've written myself out of the subject. Because it's so personal, I poured every part of myself into it, all of those emotions.

You've spoken before about your own experience of abuse. Given the personal connection to this topic, how did you care for yourself in the writing of these stories?

I think the self-care was writing it in the first place, rather than choosing not to. I found it incredibly cathartic. I wanted to understand not just why a person does these things, but why society often lets them get away with it. The thing I often say about Ireland is in the years that I was growing up, there were a very small minority of people who were committing these crimes, but a vast majority knew they were going on. One thing that runs through a lot of my novels is the idea of complicity. There's a crime itself, and there's also why we allow it. When do we intervene? Are we afraid for ourselves? How do we respond in such moments?

That question of complicity feels alive in the question of narrative, too: Who is controlling the narrative, and how does a public narrative vary from the internal narrative a character might have about themselves?

In many ways, they're all sort of lying to themselves as well as to others. There are all sort of unreliable narrators here. And each of them is questioning things in their own experiences, something they are forced to confront about their own lives, their own behavior. I wanted readers to be on board with the narrators, generally believe them. But also suspect a few things, and realize each narrator is not completely telling the truth here.

None of us want to believe that we're bad in any way. But realistically, there are things that we each feel really proud of and some things we feel ashamed of. We're human. We don't always get it right. We make mistakes, and we don't always correct those mistakes, and sometimes we don't want to confront those mistakes. Freya as a narrator, and as an abuser, is the only one as a narrator who is very aware of what she is doing, and unapologetic about it. The other three are hiding things, even from themselves.

Given the subject matter of this book, I have to ask: How do you feel about content warnings in novels?

To be honest, I think readers are adults. This isn't a book that's going to be read by children. I don't want to open a book myself and be given a content warning, because to me, it feels a bit like speaking down to the reader, not trusting the material emotions. Readers can assume that if you're going to read a piece of literature, you're going to be challenged. That's its job. Not everything is going to please everybody. I always look at these pieces from myself as a reader more than a writer. I want to get to the end of the book, and I don't want the characters to be kind of all tied up in a nice bow, I want to feel they're a bit more ambiguous because I think we all are, and I like reading things that leaves me feeling complex emotions. I guess I do my best to do that as a writer myself. --Kerry McHugh