The Blue Hour (Penguin Random House 2024) is only my second Paula Hawkins’ book, after years ago reading her international best-selling The Girl on the Train. In this novel, The Blue Hour, I got everything I was expecting in terms of a mysterious, intriguing psychological thriller, with possibly unreliable characters, past secrets and a building crescendo towards a surprising end.
But what I also got, but was not expecting, was incredible literary writing, superb and atmospheric descriptions of the natural world, and a deep sense of culture and art history that you might think is anathema to a fast-paced crime novel, but which absolutely works.
Composed of a traditional narrative interspersed with letters, diary entries and emails, The Blue Hour is set on the island of Eris, an isolated speck of land with one house and one inhabitant. There is only one way in or out of Eris, and that’s when the tide is low. Otherwise, it is unreachable (or inescapable, depending on whether you’re trying to get there or desperate to leave).
Eris is home to Grace, content in her isolation and solitude, entwined with her memories of the past and the remnants that remain. The house used to belong to a famous artist, Vanessa, who painted and sculpted furiously and prolifically, captured by the mood swings of her unfaithful husband, Julian, who notoriously disappeared 20 years earlier. Since his disappearance, Vanessa’s friendship (or was it something more?) with Grace developed into a familiar pattern, and the rhythm of their days was rarely interrupted by outsiders, until Vanessa’s death of cancer years later.
The inciting incident that begins the story is when Becker – an historian and expert on Vanessa’s work – hears word that a very famous piece of her installation art currently exhibited at a major gallery might be problematic on quite a serious level. Becker is employed by the wealthy Lennox family, who have inherited the bulk of Vanessa’s estate, including her vast artistic legacy. Sebastian Lennox and Becker were once close friends, but past circumstances have made everyone a little edgy, untrusting and suspicious.
When Becker is dispatched to Eris to meet (or confront) the curmudgeonly Grace, he finds much more than he bargained for and begins to unravel a decades’ long mystery. Is Grace merely protective of her former friend? Is her reticence to hand over Vanessa’s personal notes and papers due to loyalty, or something more sinister? Or is she merely a difficult, perhaps frightened, older woman unused to being disturbed by strangers?
The Blue Hour explores themes of artistic creativity and expression, the provenance of art, family violence, female friendship, desire, passion, betrayal, sacrifice, duty, obsession, isolation, identity, self-worth (and self-loathing), jealousy, pride, ambition and loyalty. As secrets are revealed about various characters we thought we knew, our perspective shifts, as does our feelings about their actions and motivations.
The novel includes lyrical and poetic passages / journal entries from Vanessa’s diaries, which give an immediacy to her presence, even though she is long gone. The narrative swings seamlessly back and forth in time, especially towards the end, as we uncover what happened then, and what is happening now, in real time. Both are equally unnerving.
A remarkably well-crafted psychological crime thriller that will have you turning the pages faster and faster as the action propels you forward, while at the same time being slowed down by the beautiful prose and the evocative and captivating setting.