The Elements by prolific Irish writer John Boyne is an intense novel that takes you into the darkest places of human behavior and miraculously brings you into the light with a slender promise of hope. Broadly speaking, it is about depravity, crime, guilt, complicity, prostitution, pedophilia, rape, suicide, estrangement, betrayals, loss and reconciliation. And more.

The four sections of the book – water, earth, fire and air – designate four seemingly separate story lines, in each of which the principal character is at odds with the universe. Yet the book’s structure is intricately woven so that the characters are surprisingly intertwined. The behavior of individuals in each section has a profound and lasting impact on their own lives and produces ruinous results for others. Yet, at the end of the book, well…….I won’t spoil it for you.

Section One (water)  starts out in a small, beautiful island off the west coast of Ireland. It has 400 residents and a lot of livestock. The story is told in the first person, in this case, a woman taking refuge in a rented cottage and seeking anonymity, changing her name from Vanessa Carvin to Willow Hale. She has a dead daughter, Emma, and a husband (formerly an admired public figure) in jail. Her reputation – and his – have been irreparably damaged. What has been the damage to her remaining daughter, Rebecca, and how will that affect Rebecca’s future relationships?

The second part of the book (earth) starts in the same place with a teenage boy, Evan Keogh, who wants to be a painter but is pressured by his father to be a professional footballer (soccer pro to us Americans.) His first-person narrative is of his success on the pitch, paralleled by a dark downward spiral in the rest of his life, with stunning twists and turns.

And so it goes, from the second to the third to the fourth, with dark experiences and surprising revelations.

The reader meets women who remain loyal, even though victimized by unfaithful and treacherous men. Author Boyne also raises unsettling questions about women’s complicity through silence and by action.  We come to know men brutalized in their innocent boyhood by twisted women, getting revenge for something done to them when they were vulnerable girls.

Do the elements destroy everything, as some of the characters assert? Can we live harmoniously in the world, or is the universe against us? Some parts of this book will leave you shuddering. Some will have you wondering. Ultimately, The Elements will touch you deeply.

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