The Elements: A Novel
The Elements: A Novel
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John Boyne on The Elements: A Novel
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
The same wound, returned to againBoyne has spent much of his career circling the question of what it means to witness harm and do nothing. That preoccupation is not incidental to his output but the engine of it, and he has named it directly when asked how he chooses a subject.
I write about subjects that are my preoccupation at the time, whether that’s the sexual abuse scandals in the Irish Catholic Church in A History of Loneliness, the changes in society that led to the Equal Rights Marriage referendum in 2015 in The Heart’s Invisible Furies or the insecurities that plague many writers in A Ladder to the Sky.
When the subject is the Irish Catholic Church’s abuse of children, the formal question for Boyne is where to place the camera. In his 2014 novel A History of Loneliness, he chose not a perpetrator but an enabler: a priest who saw enough to act and never did. Describing that character, he named the moral category that The Elements’ four-narrator structure would later distribute across an entire cast.
He sees things, he hears things, he suspects things, and he does nothing. He’s a coward. He may not be criminally culpable but there is blame there if he is only willing to see it.
The Elements extends this logic structurally: four narrators, each positioned differently along the same chain of harm, each carrying a portion of that blame.
A writer who keeps returning to contested Irish history might be expected to hedge. Boyne does the opposite. Speaking in 2014 about the decision to place the Church abuse crisis at the center of A History of Loneliness, he described his reaction to the controversy he knew would follow.
The fact that it is a contemporary and contentious issue didn’t scare me in the slightest. If anything, it excited me.
How he wrote it
The safety net, removedBoyne plotted his earliest novels in detail before writing them. By the time he was working on the books that immediately precede The Elements, he had abandoned that method entirely. The Good Housekeeping piece, published around the book’s release, is where he explains what replaced it.
For every book since then, I have a basic idea but trust myself now to see where it will take me. I find that quite exciting. I think once you get more experienced, you can take the safety net away and allow the story to build in front of you. Some of the ideas that go in will be cut, but some ideas that suggest themselves as you’re writing end up being the heart of the story.
That openness to surprise during drafting depends on a specific physical condition: sealed concentration, sustained for weeks at a time. Boyne described this regime to the Guardian in 2017, and the metaphor he reached for captures exactly what he fears losing if the rhythm breaks.
I generally write a first draft over the course of a month, working eight- or nine-hour days, seven days a week, completely removing myself from the world. I know that if I walk away from it during this time, the novel, like an unsupervised souffle, will simply collapse.
After the first draft, the process shifts from screen to page. He described to Hasty Booklist a method of back-and-forth between print and computer that he repeats until the manuscript is ready for his editor, typically across seven or eight full drafts.
Computer for a first draft. Pen and paper for every subsequent draft, scrawling all my changes on the print-out before feeding them back into the computer and repeating the process.
The four-part structure of The Elements, in which a minor character from one section becomes the narrator of the next, reflects a preference for non-linear storytelling Boyne has returned to across his career. The structural difficulty of any novel, he has said, is not the beginning or the end but the territory between them.
The middle third, when you’re too far away from either, is harder. You have to stay focused and make sure you sit down every day to keep that momentum going. You can’t walk away at that point or you won’t come back.
The personal thread
Closer to home than usualMost of Boyne’s novels are set outside Ireland and draw on histories he came to as a reader rather than as a participant. The Elements is an exception: it is set in Ireland and turns on the abuse scandals Boyne grew up hearing about. In a piece for Penguin, he articulated why that outward habit forms in the first place.
I’m not that interested in stories about myself, I suppose, which is why most of my own novels are not set in Ireland and are not really inspired by anything in my own life... Those things outside myself draw me in as a reader, so they compel me as a writer too.
The Elements marks a departure from that pattern. Dublin is the setting, and the harm at the novel’s center is one Boyne grew up watching Ireland refuse to confront.
On what the book is wrestling with
Examination instead of verdictThe bluntest statement of what Boyne believes fiction can and cannot do when the subject is institutional wrongdoing came in 2014, as he was finishing A History of Loneliness. The distinction he draws there is the same one that governs the architecture of The Elements.
Diatribes don’t work in fiction; examination does.
What he wants us to sit with
Lost in it, believing in it entirelyBoyne’s stated goal as a novelist is not moral instruction but emotional immersion. The standard he sets for himself, and articulates here, is whether a reader loses the distance between themselves and the story.
As a writer I want the reader to have an emotional response, whether that’s to make them laugh, cry, or be scared. If the words are to have any meaning, if the story is to have a purpose, then the reader should be lost in the novel and believe in it entirely.
For The Elements, that immersion is also an argument. A structure that places four different people inside the same crime, each with their own partial view, asks readers to locate themselves in the chain before they assign blame to anyone else.