In the decade since “The Girl on the Train” was published, Paula Hawkins has grown into a more sophisticated and complex writer.
Her 2024 release, “The Blue Hour,” requires patience, attention to detail, and an interest in both the arts and human psychology. Hawkins’ fourth novel strays from the fast-paced nature of her past works and takes time to profile a variety of characters, including with news clippings, emails, letters, and diary entries.
“The Blue Hour” targets readers eager for a puzzle box story that requires looking beyond the “who done it” for the why and how.
Character Analysis
Main Characters
Dr. Grace Haswell
Vanessa Chapman
Julian Chapman
James Becker
Dr. Grace Haswell is an ugly older woman who lives alone on Eris Island off Scotland. The retired physician was the long-time friend, companion and caregiver for renowned artist Vanessa Chapman until the woman’s death in 2017. Since then, she’s served as the executor of Vanessa’s estate and continued to reside in the island home.
Grace is an only child who isn’t in contact with her family. Her connection to Vanessa and the small village of Carrachan are the most important things in her life. She’s determined to guard the legacy of Vanessa and her artwork with her life.
Despite her unending dedication to the late painter and sculptor, no one beyond the village really knows what Grace has done for Vanessa. That she saved Vanessa’s life and took care of her through breast and brain cancers.
More than anything, Grace wants recognition for her connection and reverence for Vanessa. She has fought the Fairburn Foundation since Vanessa’s death to control her friend’s legacy and prevent anything from tarnishing her reputation. Grace also has less altruistic motives for being uncooperative.
Vanessa Chapman was a respected British painter and sculptor who died in 2017 from metastasized cancer in the brain. She’s known for her array of landscape paintings, found-item sculptures, and for her tumultuous personal life. Vanessa, a beautiful but cold artist, shared a volatile union with attractive, charming playboy Julian Chapman.
Although Vanessa died five years before “The Blue Hour” takes place, the audience learns about her through diary entries and reports from newspapers and exhibit reviews. She staunchly valued her free time, willingly lived in poverty to give her all to creating art in many forms, and resented conventional
She and Grace were friends for 19 years, including the years Grace moved to Eris to care for Vanessa as she battled cancer. Vanessa also maintained a 25-year friendship with regular correspondence with fellow artist, Frances.
Julian Chapman, like Vanessa, is gone–missing for 20 years and presumed dead–at the start of “The Blue Hour.” Since he was last seen in 2002, international efforts to find his body have proved unsuccessful, which left Vanessa under a cloud of suspicion.
Julian and Vanessa lived separate lives and were in the process of divorcing when he came to visit her on Eris shortly before her big exhibit in Glasgow. Despite their mutual infidelities and heated arguments over money, they’re drawn together through lust. However, Julian’s decision to steal one of her paintings and sell it for extra cash further strained their dynamic.
The story’s outsider, James Becker, is a Vanessa Chapman art expert. He works for the Fairburn Foundation and is assigned the task of collecting the remaining journals and artworks from Eris.
Becker grew up poor with a single mother who died of cancer when he was a teenager. Among her treasured possessions was a small landscape painting by Vanessa Chapman that was stolen and sold. He bought it back at a Christie’s art auction, which only increased his obsession with Vanessa’s work.
In the present, Becker’s wife, Helena, is eight months pregnant with their first child and his boss, Sebastian, is pressuring him to retrieve all of Vanessa’s papers, paintings, and sculptures for an upcoming exhibit.
Becker, operating under a tight deadline, wants to charm and cajole Grace into parting with Vanessa’s artifacts. But he repeatedly underestimates the retired doctor and fails to understand her possessiveness around Vanessa’s work and legacy.
Plot Summary
Set Up
The small tidal island of Eris, named for the goddess of strife and discord, once served as a sanctuary for troubled artist Vanessa Chapman and is now a preserved monument to her.
Vanessa’s isolated island home and studio are managed by Dr. Grace Haswell. For more than 20 years, the local physician resided on Eris. She cooked, cleaned, and looked after Vanessa who often forgot to eat when in the midst of creating her art and was later diagnosed with terminal cancer.
After her death in 2017, Grace became executor of the estate, while the Fairburn Foundation assumed ownership of all her journals and artwork. Since then, Grace has ignored Douglas Lennox’s multiple requests to have all Vanessa’s personal papers and the missing paintings and sculptures sent to Fairburn for study and display.
Rising Action
A call from the Tate Modern to James Becker at Fairburn reveals that a human bone may be part of a found object sculpture called Division II. While the piece is pulled for investigation, Becker makes it a priority to drive to Eris and visit Grace to finally resolve the dispute over Vanessa’s estate.
Grace reluctantly agrees to share some of her late friend’s journals with him but denies she kept any of the alleged missing artwork. The two begin to bond over their shared difficulties with Fairburn and their adoration of Vanessa.
However, Becker’s curiosity gets the better of him and he steals a letter Vanessa wrote to her correspondent, Frances, that insults Grace and shows strains in their 20-year friendship. His theft angers Grace, but she cools after he apologizes and continues to show his appreciation for Vanessa.
A bird enters Vanessa’s old bedroom through an open window, which allows Becker to see a selection of paintings Vanessa wrote about but weren’t in Fairburn’s inventory. Each of the paintings features Grace in some form, including her holding a bird and her restraining a would-be rapist while Vanessa looks on.
These hidden paintings reference “Judith Slaying Holofernes” painted by Artemisia Gentileschi in 1612-13 and the 14 Black Paintings by Francisco Goya from 1819-23. Grace sees them as part of her and Vanessa’s personal connection and refuses to part with them.
Becker knows Grace will prevent him from taking the artwork with him and Vanessa’s more personal papers. Her deception makes him wary of her, but he’s trapped on the island until the tide recedes.
During his extended stay, Grace suggests he tour Eris to see the various vantage points from which Vanessa painted the sea, sky and nearby landmarks after she offers him a drink of water that tastes brackish. The two walk up the steep inclines and through a wooded area Grace knows well.
Becker is awestruck by the images he recognizes from Vanessa’s paintings and takes many photos on his phone, even though he can only get a couple bars to contact Helena while there. The house’s wifi is unavailable, but Becker surmises it’s because of the storm.
When they return to the house, Becker searches Vanessa’s bedroom for his missing car key and sees that Grace has unplugged the router. He plugs it in and immediately receives a message from Sebastian to call.
Big Reveal
Becker goes outside to smoke and calls his supervisor. Sebastian informs him that the bone in Division II is from a missing man, Nicholas “Nick” Riley, who had mental health and addiction problems. The man’s family said he went missing from the Lake District in the early 1990s.
He vomits on his shoes upon hearing the news and ends the call.
Grace sees him vomiting and helps him back to the house where she places him on the couch and removes his sweater for washing. She informs him that his nausea is a common response to morphine and he will be fine and confesses to killing Nick.
She wraps her belt around his forearm while subduing him with her arm against his neck, and injects him with a larger dose of morphine.
Nick finds himself in a drugged stupor sitting in his car as it becomes increasingly submerged in the tide. He opens the door to exit and finds the water overtaking first his thighs, then his face. He compares himself to Goya’s “The Dog” and sees quickly flashing lights that change from white to blue.
“The Blue Hour” ends with an entry from Vanessa’s journal in which she writes: “The art you made, or the people. The friends you loved. The good you did, the bad. It matters.”
Spoilers
Grace’s mental health issues: Grace, who’s now in her 60s, suffers from a severe fear of abandonment and rejection. This begins after an overnight stay in the hospital when she was a child. In 1981, her best friends and roommates at college deserted her while she was in the hospital recovering from an infection.
Their act of cruelty derailed her life for more than a year before she saw a therapist and was able to complete her medical degree. She then started her medical career but found she couldn’t outrun her feelings of not fitting in anywhere she goes.
Nicholas’ death (1993): Twelve years after she last saw him, her friend and unrequited crush, Nicholas “Nick,” dropped into her workplace unannounced and revealed that he’s broke and has nowhere to go. Grace eagerly invited him to stay with her until he got back on his feet.
She quickly learned that he stole money and refused to contribute to the household. For his health, Grace suggested they go for a walk around Eris. They had a lovely day until Nick fell into a large hole created after a severe storm pulled up two 300-year-old trees by their roots.
His fall coincided with his mention of returning to his former girlfriend, Audrey, and leaving Grace again. This news distressed her, which led to a fight between them after Nick’s drop into the hole. He called her names, including “ugly bitch” and that action caused Grace to lose her temper and throttle him with her “butcher hands.”
She covered his body with branches and left Eris without notifying anyone.
Julian’s death (2002): Having tolerated Julian’s rude and misogynist comments, Grace killed him in a fit of rage after he saw her destroying Vanessa’s sculptures that were going to be shown by Douglas Lennox at his gallery in Glasgow. She bludgeoned him with a mason’s hammer after he called her “Butterball” and informed Grace that he and Vanessa would be celebrating the exhibit without her and then going abroad together.
His final words were a threat to reveal Grace’s destruction of the artwork and have her “banished from paradise.” The fear of losing her friendship with Vanessa caused Grace to gasp and grab the hammer.
Grace knew she lacked the strength to move Julian’s body far from the studio but wanted to keep it completely out of sight. So she dragged his corpse to the septic tank, used a rock to lift the cement cover, and placed him inside of it. His body remained in the tank for two decades undisturbed.
Vanessa’s death (2017): After Julian went missing and most of her Glasgow art show pieces were destroyed, Vanessa pulled away from Grace and asked her to leave.
Grace accepted a locum position away from Eris when Vanessa found a lump in her breast and received a cancer diagnosis. The artist then invited her estranged friend back onto their secluded island.
While Vanessa’s cancer responded to the treatment, it returned and spread to her brain. She began to experience headaches and lost sight in her right eye, and lacked the strength to create art. Grace shared an abbreviated version of her friend’s decline with Becker as he looked at her last journal entries with their crooked nonsensical writings.
Grace ended Vanessa’s suffering with an extra dose of morphine. Although she also had a motive to “shut her up” from complaining about being trapped and dragged down by Grace.
Becker’s death (2022): Realizing Becker has seen the trio of portraits Vanessa made of Grace that she’s kept hidden on Eris, she decides to poison him with the leftover vial of morphine she kept after Vanessa’s death. She places doses of it in water she gives him that he believes tastes “brackish and bitter” because of the island.
“The Blue Hour” concludes with Becker sick and disoriented on Grace’s couch as she restrains him and gives him a shot of morphine. Then, he realizes he’s alone in the car as high tide arrives at Eris making it impossible for him to return to the mainland.
He opens the car down and wades into thigh-high frigid water that soon covers his face. While he struggles to move away from the island, Becker’s mind turns toward memories of visiting a gallery of Francisco Goya and how he feels like the Drowning Dog.
The last lines are “he sees the light again, from the lighthouse, it is strobing, flashing faster now, faster, it is no longer white, now it’s blue. Now it’s blue. Now it’s blue.”
It’s left up to the reader to decide if the blue light is part of Becker’s morphine-induced haze, a police cruiser coming to Eris, or something else entirely.
Artistic References
In an Oct. 23 episode of Friends & Fiction on YouTube, Hawkins explained that she read a variety of books, including a biography of British sculptor Barbara Hepworth and a memoir by British painter Celia Paul.
However, she borrowed heavily from the life and works of deceased Scottish painter Joan Eardley. Eardley’s landscape paintings, move to an isolated area, and breast cancer diagnosis mirror Vanessa’s life. The real and fictional artists also share some controversy around the release of personal letters written between women.
Final Thoughts
Readers may learn some clues about the content of “The Blue Hour” by paying attention to who blurbed it. Acclaimed mystery writer Liz Moore (“God of the Woods” and “Long Bright River”) called it an “atmospheric, stylish puzzle box of a thriller with a deliciously inventive premise.”
Hawkins heavily relies on flashbacks and references to art movements in the UK to propel the plot. This storytelling choice creates an effective slow burn revealing the connections and conflicts among Grace, Becker and other characters that may deter thriller readers looking for a pacier read.
Beyond Hawkins’ decision to write a more nuanced and classically psychological mystery, “The Blue Hour” forces its audience to appreciate evocative descriptions of the sky and sea from Eris and understand the evolution of Vanessa’s artistic endeavors. Not all readers will be intrigued by the subject matter or have the patience for the level of detail depicted.
“The Blue Hour” is recommended for readers who enjoy reading about the creative process and can appreciate multi-layered stories focused on morally gray characters. It’s a strong departure from “The Girl on the Train” and establishes Hawkins as a more literary writer who’s able to masterfully blend fact and fiction into a new story.
Rating
My rating is 3.75/5 stars.
Book Details
Title: “The Blue Hour”
Author: Paula Hawkins
Year of Publication: 2024
Number of Pages: 305
