The Elements by John Boyne

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on September 9, 2025

The Elements is a collection of powerful moments, all related to the central themes of child sexual abuse and healing. While several characters commit or are victimized by sexual abuse, their stories are neither conventional nor filled with melodramatic weepiness. In one case, the abuser is a woman who victimizes fourteen-year-old boys. In another, an abuse victim grows up to be an abuser. These are not happy stories, but they illuminate facets of abuse that are often neglected in fiction.

True to its title, The Elements is divided into four parts: Water, Earth, Fire, and Air. A celebrated swimming coach in Water, Brendan Carvin, has been sexually abusing children on his team. His wife, Vanessa, was aware that his parents “had instilled a fear of sexuality in him from an early age, convincing him that he should be ashamed of his natural desires.” One of the Carvins’ two daughters commits suicide by drowning herself for reasons that the reader will quickly suspect. Whether Vanessa was aware (or should have been aware) of her husband’s misconduct is left for the reader to decide.

Mortified by her husband’s misconduct and ashamed that she failed to protect her family, Vanessa has changed her name and moved to a small island off the coast of Galway. Vanessa no longer listens to her favorite talk show on the radio. “Brendan and I were the subject of debate on many occasions and, masochist that I am, I couldn’t stop myself from obsessively listening as strangers called in to denounce us both.” She has endured scrutiny that is “corrosive to the soul.”

Vanessa claims she traveled to the island to learn the truth about herself. Vanessa likes “the idea of walking along the cliffs like an actress in a television advertisement, staring out to sea and contemplating the ruins of my existence.” Her younger daughter, Rebecca, habitually blocks and unblocks her mother on her cellphone. Whether Vanessa deserves a reader’s sympathy is a question each reader will need to decide.

The most dramatic moment in Water occurs when Brendan, having served his time, appears on the island, having apparently learned nothing. Vanessa asks him whether he will ever stop “asking the world to excuse you, because you still feel like a teenage boy and, somehow, you can’t help yourself.” The ability or inability to take responsibility for one’s actions is a continuing theme.

Also living on the island are Charlie Keogh and his son Evan. Charlie wants Evan to try out for a professional soccer team, but Charlie — despite his undeniable talent for the sport — doesn’t enjoy it. He’d rather be an artist. He has a dramatic moment of his own when he takes a small boat alone into the ocean. His motivation isn’t fully explained until later in the story.

The second part, Earth, focuses on Evan who, as a young adult, is working his way up the ranks of professional soccer. Before deciding to earn a living by playing a sport he doesn’t enjoy, Evan earned money by being pimped out to wealthy men. Evan is accused of being an accessory to (by recording on his phone) the rape of a young woman committed by a teammate. Some of his story is told through trial testimony.

Fire begins a couple years after the story in Earth ends, although it completes the story that Earth tells. The protagonist is Freya Petrus, a surgeon who specializes in burn injuries. Freya sat on Evan’s jury. Freya seduces a frightened boy, much against his will. Freya’s motivation for her latest act in a pattern of sexual misconduct with young male teens traces to her victimization by young teenage males when she was twelve.

Air is a family drama and the most redemptive of the four parts. Years after the events in Water, Rebecca is now married to Aaron Umber, whose own history of abuse is described earlier in the novel. They are in love, but their marriage is sexless apart from rare instances, one of which leads to the birth of Emmet. Aaron is now divorced from Rebecca, perhaps because of a female novelist who knew them both. Aaron feels abandoned by Rebecca. Most of Air follows Aaron’s attempts to stay connected to his son as they travel back to the island where the events on Water unfold. They are making the trip to attend a funeral.

The point of Air is that it is never too late for our emotional wounds to heal, provided we have the courage to begin the process. Air ends with a message of hope, the hope that damaged parents can raise an undamaged child, a child who — once old enough to understand — learns from his parents’ damage. The message infuses the novel with elements of a happy ending, at least for a few characters. As the female novelist explains, “In the end, the reader just wants everyone to survive and be happy.”

The Elements raises important questions. Are bad people born that way or is their behavior a product of their upbringing? The book offers no easy answers because there are none. Freya was damaged by her childhood, but she inflicts more than her share of damage before she’s in her mid-30s. Aaron had a traumatic experience but turned into a man who wants nothing more than to be a loving father. Why were their life outcomes different?

John Boyne is careful to give characters who do evil things some sort of consequence. This is presumably an attempt to give readers what they want — at least the opportunity to imagine a happy ending, even if he doesn’t write one for each character — despite the novel’s overall recognition that people who do evil things often live consequence-free lives. Sometimes they’re even rewarded for their bad conduct.

Some of the story is deeply disturbing. Sensitive readers might want to avoid The Elements. Yet the story’s disturbing nature is vital to its success. Each central character, good or evil or a mix of both, is struggling to make a life. At least one finds redemption. At least one rejects the concept. The complexity of life and the struggle to shape it give the novel its weight. The Elements can be an emotionally difficult read, but its refusal to turn away from ugliness ranks it among the most meaningful books I’ve read this year.

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A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne

Published by Crown Publishing/Hogarth on November 13, 2018

A Ladder to the Sky is a novel about writers, some real but most imagined, which means it is a book about people with frail egos who spend much of their time sniping at each other. I enjoyed that. The story raises issues of karma and justice, and I liked that even more than the sniping.

A word of caution, however, to readers who do not like novels unless the characters are likable. The protagonist, Maurice Swift, is a talented wordsmith but is incapable of contriving plots, a deficiency he overcomes by stealing them. Even worse, while Maurice is charming and clever, he is also despicable: an ambitious, narcissistic sociopath who advances his career without regard to how he harms the people in his life. He is, in fact, one of the vilest characters ever to play a starring role in a literary novel.

Many of the other characters are writers and while they are typically portrayed as self-involved and somewhat pitiable, none approach Maurice’s malevolence. I enjoyed being appalled by Maurice. Evil characters tend to be more interesting than icons of virtue and Maurice is a fascinating train wreck of a person. Other readers might not be able to stomach an unlikable protagonist.

Point of view shifts throughout the novel. The story is only sometimes narrated by Maurice. As the novel begins, Maurice appears to be a secondary character, a young man worming his way into the life of Erich Ackerman, a literature professor at Cambridge who left his home in Germany at the war’s end, and who hoped to leave his secrets in the Fatherland. Ackerman achieved literary recognition at the age of 66 with the publication of his sixth novel. Ackerman meets Maurice in Berlin on a book tour, then makes Maurice the sole member of his entourage. Ackerman is gay and feels an unspoken yearning for Maurice, who claims not to have given his sexuality much thought.

Maurice longs for literary fame of his own. Ackerman, acting as his mentor, honestly appraises Maurice as an excellent technician who fails to tell compelling stories. Maurice finds his way to literary fame by betraying Ackerman in a way that will put an end to his mentor’s literary career. Perhaps Ackerman deserves that fate — whether Ackerman merits harsh judgment is one of the book’s important questions — but Ackerman has balanced his youthful misdeeds with an adult life that is exemplary. Many readers will feel sympathy for Ackerman, although other readers probably won’t.

Maurice uses another gay writer, Dash Hardy, in much the same way, leading to an intriguing literary interval involving an acerbic but perceptive Gore Vidal before the book moves to Maurice’s marriage and the next stage of his life. One dramatic section of the book involves Maurice’s wife; another involves his son, although the nature of the latter dramatic episode is hidden until the story nears its end. Under other circumstances, a reader would feel compassion for Maurice given the pain an ordinary person would endure in a tragic life, but Maurice is no ordinary person.

Maurice meets a young man near the novel’s end who reminds him of his lost son and their interaction suggests that Maurice may be capable of feeling well-deserved guilt, if only at a subconscious level. While many of the characters are distasteful, Boyne balances the pack with a few sympathetic characters, including Maurice’s wife, who play key roles. In any event, karma makes the novel likable even if the protagonist is not.

A Ladder to the Sky is a compelling novel, not because it creates empathy for its protagonist (John Boyne does quite the opposite) but because the story is absorbing and truth-telling. The novel’s theme is that some talented people cannot be happy with success on its own terms but wish to rise above their peers, to be seen as the best, even if they must tear down their peers to achieve that end. The story advances the quotation that is generally attributed to Gore Vidal (and that Vidal attributed to himself): “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” Stated differently, the notion is that ambition is a pointless waste of energy, like setting a ladder to the sky. The book is honest and provocative. It is also immensely satisfying.

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