Book review: Thrill and shame of the flame

“I was a reasonably attractive teenager, but I became more striking in my twenties, and now, in my mid-thirties, I’ve somehow become beautiful. Almost every heterosexual doctor in the hospital has hit on me at one time or another, but I’ve knocked them all back.”

This is Dr Freya Petrus speaking, a surgeon specialising in skin grafts for people disfigured by burns, and the narrator of this, the third of John Boyne’s quartet of short novels relating to the elements.

  Water and Earth are out already, with Air to follow in May, 2025. Here, the best-selling author plays with fire, both literally and metaphorically.

Freya’s account of hospital life in a nameless English city is told in alternate chapters to the story of her deprived childhood. 

She is brought up by her grandmother, Hannah, who was 32 when Freya was born to 16 year old Beth. A year later Beth, moves to Cornwall, leaving Freya in Hannah’s care. 

Every summer she is sent by train to spend July and August with Beth, who lives near a beach. She smokes and drinks and is totally indifferent to her daughter’s presence. 

When she is 12, Freya meets the latest in a long line of Beth’s boyfriends, Eli, who seems better than average.

Eli, a builder, works for the landlord, a rich man who has inseparable 14 year old twins, Arthur and Pascoe. 

They become pals with Freya and play a “game” every day in which the twins take turns to rape her. 

When she refuses to go on playing, she misses their company, and is glad when they invite her to play another game. 

But this involves locking her in a chest and burying her alive on a building site. 

Convinced she is going to die, she spends a terrifying night in the locked chest, covered with rubble, with only a breathing tube for air, convinced she is going to die.

Meanwhile, we learn more about Freya’s life as a surgeon in the burns unit. 

One case of domestic abuse of a small boy shocks the whole team when it is revealed that the mother, not the tough-looking father, is the abuser.

Another, a woman and three small children, suffering serious burns after a house fire, are so horrific to see that Dr Petrus’s intern, Aaron, had to go outside and throw up when he first saw them. 

Only one survives the arrival at A&E. A detective reveals that it was their estranged father who started the fire, shocking Aaron deeply.

Aaron makes an effort to get to know Freya, inviting her for a drink after work. She is wary of him, but not sure why, and senses that his strong sense of empathy will make him a very fine doctor.

Meanwhile, readers have discovered how loner Freya likes to spend her nights off.

Spoiler alert my friends: She gets her kicks by seducing 14 year old boys.

You will hurtle through the book, because it is such a compelling story, so cleverly written.

But after all the excitement is over, and you think about it more calmly, Freya totally fails to convince as a character.

Was she born evil, or did circumstances make her so? Who cares, as she seems only to exist in order to further the plot.

How did she progress from a traumatised, impoverished 12-year-old to a skilful surgeon, with a swanky apartment and a flashy car?

I read it immediately after having been shocked by heart-breaking reports of “catfisher” Alexander McCartney’s online sexual abuse of children.

The suicide in Boyle’s novel rather too closely echoes the real-life suicide of the catfisher’s 12-year-old victim. Faced with this tragedy, the novel, readable though it is, seems facile and cheap.