The Blue Hour | Paula Hawkins
REVIEWED BY LINDA HILL
Artist Vanessa Chapman has left her estate to the Fairburn Foundation, but her close friend Grace is refusing to part with all of the effects. When one of Vanessa’s sculptures is found to contain a human bone, curator James Becker heads to tidal Eris Island to confront Grace and retrieve the items belonging to the foundation. Little does he realise the chain of events that will ensue.
The Blue Hour: book review & synopsis
The Blue Hour is phenomenal. There’s an underlying atmosphere of menace and toxicity that runs throughout the book creating tangible tension. With a slow build, pressure cooker intensity, Paula Hawkins writes with sparse beauty, exploring the fine line we all tread between interest and obsession, love and hate, sanity and madness. Her descriptions of both physical and emotional elements are pitch perfect. The artworks depicted come to life so effectively that when they are blended with real references to the likes of Tracey Emin and Damien Hurst, it is impossible to believe Vanessa is a character and not a real-life talented artist.
Different layers of mystery hook the reader. The human bone in Vanessa’s sculpture, the whereabouts of works that should have been passed to the Fairburn Foundation on her death, what happened to Vanessa’s missing, estranged husband and quite what Grace does or doesn’t know, are threads that fascinate, making the reader every bit as intrigued as James Becker. There’s a Hitchcockian tension that makes the imagination run riot.
The characters in The Blue Hour are toxic, self-serving and self-deceptive. They are hard to like, but all the more realistic for it. Loneliness, desire and betrayal impel them onwards and there’s the unsettling sensation that if we scratch beneath our own veneer of civilisation we might just find similar traits in ourselves.
The plot is deceptive…
It’s only at the end (which I suspect might divide opinion) that the subtle clues, the allusions and the almost Shakespearean themes and hints, all draw together, and the brilliance of the narrative, its symbolism and sheer cleverness, is fully appreciated.
With its almost melancholic, intense malevolence, The Blue Hour is an intelligent and finely wrought exploration of creativity, obsession and greed in many forms – emotional, physical, financial, intellectual – so that it wraps itself around the reader’s psyche and ensnares their attention completely. I loved it.
The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins is out now (Doubleday, HB, £22) and available from Amazon.
Read more fiction reviews by Linda Hill including Edith Holler by Edward Carey, The Black Loch by Peter May, Rewitched by Lucy Jane Wood, Small Bomb At Dimperley by Lissa Evans, The Book Swap by Tessa Bickers, Scandalous Women by Gill Paul and Island In The Sun by Katie Fforde.
