Is evil born or made? From the startling opening revelation that when she was 12, two teenage boys buried Freya alive in the grounds of a construction site, Fire by John Boyne offers a scorching (what else?) response to this age-old debate. Is Freya – who is such a chilling and unsettling character that she loomed large in the nightmare I had the night I finished the book – a psychopath or sociopath?
Thirty-six-year-old Dr Freya Petrus (the name is well chosen, for she is hard and impenetrable as a rock) appears to have a privileged life. A hard-working surgeon specialising in skin grafts, she explains to a younger colleague that she chose to work in burns because people are repelled by burn victims. She has a swanky apartment and a flash sports car. She is exceptionally beautiful, with a sharp, dark wit (such as, “You know things are bad when even your imaginary boyfriend cheats on you”). But underneath this veneer lies a predator. This makes for a tough read in places, but Boyne’s refusal to shirk Freya’s monstrosity is also the novel’s biggest success. In almost hypnotically clean, clear prose, he lays out the facts of her upbringing and the traumas she suffered, and in turn, the many cruelties she chooses to inflict.
Freya’s grip on how the narrative unfurls is so taut that the only times the pace falters are those few moments when she isn’t in control: once when she discusses a sexual abuse case and conviction with the girlfriend of a colleague (though it is a necessary exchange for the connective tissue of the novel’s themes); and in what she later refers to as, “the night of the long texts” – a lengthy sequence of messages she receives from a teenage boy.
Fire is the third in a series of four novellas in Boyne’s elements quartet. Water and Earth are available, Air will conclude the series next May. The books are stand-alone novels yet are linked (I hadn’t read Water or Earth before Fire, but on the assumption they are equally powerful and memorable, have since got them both).
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“The elements destroy everything,” observes Freya, fully aware of the irony in being the burns doctor who won’t – can’t – stop playing with fire.
Henrietta McKervey is a writer and a critic
