The Elements: A Novel

The Elements by Irish author John Boyne is a collection of four interconnected novellas first published together on 2025. It is a work of literary fiction, and each novella is titled after one of the four basic elements—Water, Earth, Fire, and Air—and follows a different protagonist who is a character in the previous story. Each character represents a different perspective on child abuse and sexual assault: the enabler, the accomplice, the perpetrator, and the victim. Despite its diverse cast of characters and stories, the novel features concrete themes of Complicity and Enabling in Abuse, Resistance to Taking Responsibility, and Trauma as a Transmissive Force. John Boyne is the author of such books as The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2006), A Ladder to the Sky (2018), and The Heart’s Invisible Furies (2017). 

This guide refers to the 2025 hardcover edition by Henry Holt and Company.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature sexual violence and harassment, rape, child sexual abuse, child abuse, death by suicide, child death, emotional abuse, physical abuse, antigay bias, bullying, suicidal ideation, and self-harm.

Plot Summary

In Water, Vanessa Carvin moves to an isolated cottage on a sparsely populated island off the coast of western Ireland. When she arrives, she changes her name to Willow Hale and shaves her head. She is escaping the public eye after her husband’s trial and sentencing for assaulting eight young girls while working at the national swimming federation. She has two daughters: Emma, who is dead, and Rebecca, who will not speak to her.

As the months pass, Vanessa rarely ventures out of the cottage, occasionally going into the village. She visits the church one time, speaking with the priest, Ifechi, who refuses to tell her more about the townspeople. One day, there is a commotion at the beach, where she learns that a local boy, Evan Keogh, took a boat out and is feared to be drowned. She sits with his mother, who tells Vanessa that the boy’s father is controlling and wants him to be a football star. Evan wants to be a painter. When his father brings him back, Evan storms off.

Before her life on the island, Vanessa was a dutiful wife and mother. She was from a generation of traditional Irish women, and when she married her husband, Brendan, they had two girls. Brendan spent all of his time at the swimming federation, coming home late and wandering around. When the girls were teenagers, Emma asked Vanessa to put a lock on her bedroom door, complaining that Brendan always woke her up. Vanessa said no.

One day, Brendan came home and announced he was going on a sabbatical. The family went to Wexford, on the coast. When Brendan received a mysterious call, he announced that they would return to Dublin so he could continue working. The next morning, Rebecca came into their room in a panic, saying Emma was missing. Emma had swum out into the ocean in the night and drowned.

Later, Brendan was arrested for assaulting eight young swimmers, and, though he denied the claims, was sentenced to prison. Rebecca believed that Brendan also assaulted Emma and blamed Vanessa for not stopping it and letting her sister die.

When Brendan calls Vanessa from prison on the island, he continues to say he is innocent, but Vanessa refuses to believe him. When Rebecca comes to visit, she tells her mother that Emma told her that Brendan assaulted her the night she died by suicide, but that she did not believe her. They hug and feel as though they can begin to heal. When Vanessa leaves the island, ready to start a new life, Evan Keogh takes the boat with her.

Years later, in Earth, Evan is a famous football player on trial for being an accomplice to rape. His teammate, Robbie, is on trial for the rape. A girl named Lauren Mackintosh accused Robbie of raping her while Evan filmed it. However, there is no video evidence, as Evan lost the phone. Evan’s parents come to England for the trial, and his father’s controlling nature puts him on edge.

When Evan first left the island, he made his way to London and tried to be an artist. When this did not work, he was approached by a man named Rafe, who turned Evan into a sex worker, earning Evan money. When Rafe sent Evan to Sir, a secretive and famous man, Evan was abused on a weekly basis, with no way to stop the meetings. When Sir was done with Evan, Rafe abandoned him, and broke his arm as a warning to never speak about the experience.

With no way to make money, Evan turned to football, and joined Rafe’s son’s team as a means of insurance. Now, as the trial ensues, Rafe—who is really Lord Wolverton—approaches Evan and pleads with him to take the fall, threatening that if he and Robbie end up in prison, Evan will die. Despite Lauren’s testimony, Evan and Robbie are found not guilty.

On the night of the crime, Robbie, Evan, and their teammates went to a club and brought girls to Robbie’s apartment. Evan is gay, and in love with Robbie, though he knows Robbie does not love him. When Robbie beckoned him upstairs, Evan followed him and Lauren. When he entered the room, Lauren told him to leave, but Robbie pinned her down and assaulted her while Evan filmed it and ignored her pleas for help. The next morning, he walked back to his apartment and buried the phone in a garden.

Two years after the trial, Evan encounters Lauren in a bar and apologizes. She tells him that if he were truly sorry, he’d admit that he was guilty and vindicate her. The next day, he digs up the phone and turns it into the police, finally feeling at peace.

Fire follows Dr. Freya Petrus, who was one of the jurors at Evan’s trial. She is a doctor in the burn unit at a hospital, where she works with a medical student, Aaron Umber, who claims she inspired him to become a doctor when she visited his school. One morning, she comforts a disgruntled boy on a bench outside the hospital. Weeks later, she drives to a park and waits for football practice to get out. As she waits, the boy from the hospital, George, calls her. She panics and hangs up.

When practice ends, she asks one of the boys to help her with directions, but drives him back to her apartment, where she rapes him. Afterwards, she tells him that he raped her and that he better not tell anyone. The boy, who is 14, suffers a breakdown and later attempts to die by suicide.

When Freya was 12, she spent the summer with her mother in Cornwall. She made friends with the neighbors, the twins Arthur and Pascoe, who were two years older than her. They brought her to the caves in the cliff every day and raped her. When she refused to continue doing it, they buried her in a crate in the backyard of their house, leaving her there all night. Her mother never noticed she was gone, and when Freya returned, she saw that her mother was sleeping with Arthur and Pascoe’s father. Right before she left, Freya waited for a night when her mother was at Arthur and Pascoe’s house, and while they slept, she set the house on fire, framing the contractor, as revenge against the twins.

Now, Freya targets and assaults young boys as a means of revenge, ruining their chances of forging healthy, romantic relationships. One night, George appears at her door and demands more sex, saying he knows that she assaulted him. Freya has no choice but to comply, and over the course of weeks, she lets him come to her apartment. Meanwhile, she grows closer to Aaron, even meeting his girlfriend, Rebecca, who trains to be a pilot.

When Freya finally has enough of George, she drugs his drink one night at her apartment, and he suffers a stroke. She checks her emails while he dies on the floor. Afterwards, she sneaks him into the morgue without being seen on camera. She takes a week off from work, and when she returns, no one can figure out where George’s body came from. Aaron asks to speak with her privately, and reveals that he is one of the boys she raped, and that he is turning her in. She tries to convince him not to, but he refuses.

Freya knows that no one will believe she does what she does because of what the twins once did to her, and she runs. She drives to a school and waits for a boy to walk by her car.

Nearly two decades later, in Air Aaron Umber takes his son, Emmet, on a trip from Australia to Ireland. Emmet is 14 and does not want to go. They are travelling to be there for his mother, Rebecca, whose mother just died. Rebecca, however, lives in Dubai. She relocated there for her work after she and Aaron split because of her infidelity with the author Furia Flyte. Aaron is fiercely protective of Emmet and considers whether he should tell him about what Freya did to him, or who Rebecca’s father was.

Aaron and Rebecca met in a coffee shop and quickly fell in love. They each revealed their traumas to each other but never discussed how it impacted their relationship. They never had sex. Aaron never processed what Freya did to him, and Brendan’s abuse of Emma haunts Rebecca. When Vanessa visited them before their wedding, she told Aaron not to marry Rebecca. After their honeymoon, Brendan found their apartment, spewing vitriol at how Rebecca and Vanessa betrayed him.

When they moved to Australia for Rebecca’s work, they conceived Emmet. At a party, they met Furia Flyte, for whom Aaron felt true desire. Despite his efforts to court Furia, Furia refused, and instead became involved with Rebecca, leading to their divorce.

When Aaron and Emmet arrive on the tiny island where Vanessa once stayed, Aaron tells Emmet about Rebecca’s past, and Emmet forgives his mother, supporting her through her difficult time. Aaron also tells Emmet about what happened to him, and Emmet is very sympathetic. Rebecca tells Aaron that he is a great father, and that he needs to heal. Aaron decides to stay on the island for a year and work toward ending his life as a victim and beginning his life as a survivor.