The elements of good storytelling.

John Boyne’s elements quartet

“The first thing I do when I arrive on the island is change my name.”

So begins the first novella of John Boyne’s quartet – and I’m hooked. The stories, Water, Earth, Fire, and Air, were published separately between 2023 and 2025, are cleverly and subtly interconnected, but hold as stand-alone works. “Each book looks at sexual crime from a different perspective,” says the author, “enabling, complicity, perpetrator, and victim.” Written in first-person by four separate narrators, the four novellas feature characters dealing with past trauma and looking for some measure of contentment in the present.  

The titular element of each book plays its part within the story. Water, for example, is set on a remote Irish island where Willow has gone to live a hermetic existence. Evan, the narrator of Earth, is confronting the earthy consequences of his past traumas and actions. There is also a thematic connection to the earth with the nature of his career as a professional footballer – his life-skill ‘grounded’ in his feet. In Fire the main protagonist, Freya, is a surgeon specialising in skin grafts: “…after all, a doctor in a burns unit should know better than to play with fire.” The last in the series, Air, is narrated by Aaron – the story beginning thirty thousand feet in the air, as he travels back to Ireland with his fourteen-year-old son to meet a woman who isn’t expecting them. You might have picked here that the initial letter of each narrator’s name matches their respective book title.

I watched an interview with John Boyne where he talked about creating characters in novels.

“You have to make your characters as ambiguous, as complex as possible –

because all of us in life are complex people. Nobody is really a monster or a saint. Most of us are somewhere in the middle trying to do our best. We’re all capable of moments of great kindness but we probably all have moments we’re ashamed of in our lives – that’s just what makes us human.”

John Boyne.

Boyne never planned to write this as a series – after having previously written some lengthy novels his intention was to write a shortish novella. But as he mapped out the plot for Water – the story of an enabler in sexual crime, he realised there was a broader exploration needed to look at the consequences from four different perspectives. This led to the creation of the four novellas with their respective elemental theme. With the order of the sequence, Boyne felt it was important to finish with the victim/survivor. To finish with some hope.

“You can go through these terrible experiences; you can have these terrible things happen to you – but you can survive them. You do not have to give every minute of your life over to the abuser. You can find peace.”

John Boyne.

Boyne took on a logistical challenge in writing these four novellas, each worthy and compelling as individual works, yet he found masterful ways to weave strings of connection across the series. The writing is intelligent and humane, and the whole achingly sad. Closing the last page of Air, I sighed audibly. Fitting, then, that I should expel a short breath – of air.