Though perhaps still best known for The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, John Boyne has been highly productive since the critical success of his 2017 novel The Heart’s Invisible Furies. He is now embarking on a quartet of interlinked novellas, which will appear biannually over the next two years. The cohering theme is the four elements – so Water will be followed in due course by Earth, Air and Fire.
The verbal representation of water has a rich literary history, from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves to Alice Oswald’s Dart. However, readers anticipating playful linguistic responses to the elements will be disappointed – water, in this book, is something to swim in, drown in or live next to. Though the novella’s title gestures towards the baptismal, cleansing nature of the story it tells, the metaphor remains implicit, and is never really drawn out in the course of the book. What Boyne offers instead of innovation is an almost note-perfect piece of first-person storytelling.
