Reviewers of Paula Hawkins’s corpus of fiction often allege that, after the bestselling success of her debut novel The Girl on the Train (2015), she has moved in a more “literary” direction with her psychological thrillers.¹ While not wholly inaccurate, the claim seems to equate soaring sales worldwide and a film adaptation with lesser fare. Even so it [→ page 238] cannot be denied that, with the narratological complexity of Into the Water (2017) and A Slow Fire Burning (2021), Hawkins gravitated toward a more refracted, layered, and polyphonic form of storytelling.² Her 120-page novella Blind Spot (2022), issued by Penguin Random House as a paperback, signaled a retrenchment of sorts as she stripped her tale of everything except its Gothic skeleton. With Hawkins’s next effort, The Blue Hour (2024), those who follow this author’s career are immersed once again in a compelling crime story that engages with such issues as art, feminism, and misogyny. Liminality is conveyed through the tidal flux that governs the novel’s setting, an island connected to the Scottish mainland by a causeway that floods twice in every twenty-four hours. For those stranded on Eris Island, the prospect is delicately balanced, like the threshold between sleep and wakefulness, at “‘l’heure bleue’” of either dawn or dusk (218; cf. 274). The present essay argues that, beyond its meteorological implications, the trope of liminality also pertains to other tenuous margins involving art and murder in Hawkins’s narrative.

The novelist prepares for this thematic focus by juxtaposing characters of entrenched sociocultural standing with those of a more independent spirit who have ventured beyond their backgrounds.  A leading example of the latter is James Becker, earlier in life a “fatherless bastard of a supermarket checkout girl” and “state-school boy in a cheap suit” (7), who now works as a curator at the Fairburn Foundation after strategically befriending the son of its former director, Douglas Lennox, while at university. Another such agent, though a psychologically troubled one, is Grace Haswell, a general practitioner in her mid-sixties whom artist Vanessa Chapman appointed executor of her estate before dying of cancer five years ago in October 2016. Completing the group of focal personae is the painter and ceramicist herself, who ever since she moved from Oxfordshire to Eris Island in 1997 revels in the freedom to “answer to no one, only the tide” (19).³ In contrast to these characters, the secondary cast—Sebastian Lennox, his mother Lady Emmeline, and Becker’s wife Helena (née Fitzgerald)—is comprised of fairly static, two-dimensional figures. Given the centrality of what transpires on Eris [→ page 239] Island, Hawkins’s fourth novel according to one source presents “an exploration of obsession in its many forms” reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith and Daphne du Maurier (Rev. of The Blue Hour). Supporting this claim is the fact that The Blue Hour makes intertextual mention of du Maurier’s haunting Rebecca (1938), “The Birds” (1952), and Don’t Look Now (1971), while also referring twice to Artemisia Gentileschi’s early Baroque painting Judith Slaying Holofernes (see 27, 28, 231; 51, 247). Because the latter is widely regarded as a depiction of strong women, an interviewer for CrimeReads.com found a pronounced streak of feminism in Hawkins’s most recent narrative (see Hawkins, “Paula Hawkins Talks Art”). While this claim is doubtlessly true, the fiercely independent Vanessa Chapman is also depicted as vulnerable in her artistic passions.

In her personal life, at least up to mid-2002, Vanessa was still beguiled intermittently by her estranged husband Julian, a spendthrift given to “a devil-may-care approach to life” (16) who, while involved with a wealthy lover named Celia Gray, visited Vanessa on Eris Island but never returned from the trip. His unaccountable disappearance raises suspicions of foul play, particularly because his distinctive sportscar, a red Duetto Spider 1600, was never found. Aside from these disturbances, however, Vanessa Chapman devotes herself unsparingly to her art as she struggles to develop a distinctive style somewhere, according to her critics, between abstraction and figuration. Driven to be “single-minded,” as she writes in her diary, because she must “put work at the heart of my life” (53), Vanessa increasingly finds that art becomes the only medium by which she is revitalized. A yearning for the illimitable has its counterpart for her in dark seascapes. As she puts it in another of her diary entries, “The sky challenges, but the sea confounds: restless, ever-changing, the deep round swell of it, the violence” (96). What she seeks to capture on her canvases, readers can infer, is the dynamic and constantly shifting liminality of the ocean itself.

The other main characters are distinguished by their consuming devotion to Vanessa Chapman: Grace Haswell as her live-in companion and James Becker as an ardent researcher of the artist’s oeuvre. In both [→ page 240] cases their admiration for Chapman is traceable to personal circumstances involving their pasts. Ever since Nick Riley, a boy she knew as an undergraduate, “abandoned her” (78), Grace over the ensuing decades has sought to escape her loneliness by becoming a “provincial GP” (59). After treating Vanessa for a broken wrist in 1998, she became entranced by her patient’s solitary way of life on Eris Island and, except for “an eighteen-month period when Grace left the island and took a temporary job in the north of England, the year following Julian Chapman’s disappearance” (116), has shared Vanessa’s retreat ever since. James Becker’s fascination with the artist is also rooted in the past. Happily married to his seven-months pregnant wife Helena, the Fairburn Foundation curator explains in an email letter to Grace Haswell, hoping to persuade her to allow him access to Vanessa Chapman’s papers, that his awareness of the artist began when he was thirteen. At that age, though “clueless about art” (60), he searched through the belongings of his mother, a “talented watercolorist” before as an unwed mother she had to drop out of college and take a menial job (59), in a futile attempt to find a cherished eight-by-five-inch oil painting by Chapman that she had bought. Years later, Becker recounts, he acquired the 1993 work titled Hedgerow with his first paycheck from Christie’s auction house.⁴ The personal confession persuades Haswell, who on their first meeting had rejected him as an intrusive outsider, to grant him a second visit.

From this point onward Chapman’s executor and the Fairburn emissary, both of whom are servitors, come to a working agreement whereby the artist’s legacy will be honored. For her part Grace will entrust James with some of Vanessa’s private notebooks and letters, in return for which he will ensure that no more threats of legal action are mounted by the Foundation he represents. The bargain works well initially, though later it will lead to outcomes that neither party could have foreseen. These include the novel’s subsequent revelation that, owing to her emotional scarring in the past, the woman whom Sebastian Lennox dismissively characterizes as the “‘Wicked Witch of Eris Island’” (12), owing to her reluctance to relinquish all of Chapman’s work, is what criminologists often consider a borderline serial murderer. Before [→ page 241] divulging that twist, however, The Blue Hour adumbrates a homicide committed by Lady Emmeline Lennox, the imperious and silver-haired dowager who presides at the Fairfield estate and whom Becker considers an “‘[e]vil hag’” (15) because of her patrician condescension toward him.

Hawkins’s novel initially leads readers to view these two older women as antitypes. Near the beginning, for example, she writes of Haswell that “All the years on Eris Island—more than twenty of them now—have made Grace tidal. A lunatic. An actual lunatic! Governed by the moon” (21). As though to reinforce that diegetic comment, the text immediately mentions Grace Haswell’s charitable kindness toward “[a]nother lunatic” named Marguerite, who lives in a cottage at the harbor (22). Now in her seventies, the addled native from Brittany is still obsessively worried that her abusive husband Stuart Cummins, who has been gone for more than twenty years, might return to hurt her again. Interwoven with that backstory is an account recorded in Vanessa Chapman’s diary of how Grace prevented Cummins from raping Vanessa in her studio by wrapping a clay-cutting wire around his neck and restraining him until police arrived an hour and a half afterwards (see 136-37). Chapman later depicted her initial encounter with Cummins in a painting titled Black II,⁵ but as a consequence of the assault Haswell moved to Eris Island while continuing to work at a hospital on the mainland. If “All the years on Eris Island [...] have made Grace tidal,” Hawkins implicitly is paralleling Haswell’s impulse toward murderous violence with the sea’s liminal power that Vanessa Chapman seeks to capture in her art.

Ostensibly far different from Grace Haswell as a “provincial GP” is the haughty matron at Fairfield who presides, if only by longevity, over the estate, but she too figures in the novel as a vengeful madwoman, if not quite a lunatic. Roughly a third of the way into The Blue Hour it is mentioned that Lady Emmeline Lennox, later said to be a crack markswoman worthy of competing in the Olympics (see 177), “‘accidentally shot her husband in the neck’” while hunting together, “‘and he bled [→ page 242] out in front of her.’” Upon hearing his employer recount the event and say “‘That’s just the way it went,’” James Becker skeptically recalls:

The way it went was that Mr. Bryant, the gamekeeper, who is not much younger than Sebastian’s mother and has worked for her family since he was a teenager, claimed that the stray shot came from his gun, sparing Lady Emmeline the ordeal of a police investigation and all the press intrusion that would go with it. There was an investigation, which cleared Bryant of any wrongdoing—the fault, if there were any, lay with Douglas himself, who had walked ahead of the guns and put himself in harm’s way—and [Bryant] retired a few months later. Quite possibly, Becker thinks, with a rather more generous pension than he might have been expecting. (87; italics in original)

Lady Emmeline shot her husband Douglas after she was humiliated by firsthand evidence of his sexual encounters with Vanessa Chapman (see 111), but compounding the matriarch’s disgrace is that an “actual lunatic,” namely Grace Haswell, is aware of what transpired. “‘I could make life difficult for that family if I put my mind to it’” (248), Haswell boasts to Becker, and subsequently she does so by telling police that she has reason to believe Douglas Lennox’s death was not accidental.

The Blue Hour thus traces an arc of women’s desperation leading to homicide that is rooted in the overpowering need for simple respect. To state the case quite so baldly, though, risks reductionism because, unlike Lady Emmeline’s, the circumstances faced by Grace Haswell are far more severe. Chronologically, she first commits murder when in 1993 an emaciated Nick Riley, whom she had met more than a decade earlier, shows up at her clinic in Carrachan, and Grace, while billeting him in her small house, attends to restoring his health. Upon his arrival she thinks to herself: “This is what the end of loneliness felt like […]. It felt like the end of hostilities: with the world, with herself. It felt like the beginning of possibility” (290). That prospect is crushed, however, when during an outing on Eris Island he announces his intention to leave the next day in order to “‘track Audrey down’” in Manchester (293), the same girl with whom, though all three were “‘flatmates for a while’” (155), he abandoned Grace on an overseas camping trip in 1981. While quarrelling over Nick’s current plans, which for Grace reprise [→ page 243] painful memories, he stumbles into the pit of an upended tree and, after he drags himself to level ground, she without “really understanding what was happening, without intention,” closes her “butcher’s hands” around his throat (295). The human rib that, at the novel’s beginning, is found in Vanessa Chapman’s glass-enclosed piece titled Division II, circa 2005, becomes a relic that attests to Grace Haswell’s initial crime.

Her second murder also occurs as a direct consequence of male dismissal, mockery, and humiliation. Nine years later, before Julian Chapman went missing in 2002, he showed up in Vanessa’s kitchen, and the next day, passing beneath an open window, Grace heard him referring to her as la petite boule de suif. When, on the following afternoon, Vanessa explains that the epithet means “butterball” but was not intended cruelly, Haswell bristles at her friend’s casual dismissal of the derogatory characterization. “‘Men like him,’” she fulminates,

“have a special kind of contempt for women like me—ugly women. I’ve felt it all my life. An ugly woman is barely human to a man like your husband. It’s sickening but not all that shocking. What’s worse, what is utterly abject, is the way that women like you—the pretty, the chosen—the way you collude in that contempt.” (147-48; italics in original)

Understandably hurt by her friend’s insensitivity to the chauvinistic slight, Grace accepts Vanessa’s apology but a few days later finds her kneeling in her studio with a bloodied hand. After a brief trip to Glasgow, before which Vanessa left a note for Julian discontinuing further financial support and saying that “now we can be free of each other” (160), he, in revenge, had destroyed several of her ceramics and canvases, and she had cut herself while picking up the pieces. Pursuant to a police inquiry about the missing Julian, it is revealed fifteen chapters later that he had returned to Eris Island during Vanessa’s absence and belligerently claimed that she was planning to go abroad with him a few months thereafter. Outraged at yet another threat of abandonment, Grace swings a mason’s hammer, “smashing it into his temple and shattering his skull” (262). Subsequently, “with an undeniable surge of pleasure” (275), she maneuvers Julian’s corpse into the septic tank behind Vanessa’s house.

[→ page 244] In contrast to these other homicides, the third, with which Hawkins’s novel ends, is quite different in terms of victim and circumstances. Having come to enjoy James Becker’s company during his visits, Grace Haswell, at the same time, jealously guards her relationship with the artist, keeping to herself a 2003 letter that Vanessa had written to her in Carlisle saying, “I don’t want you to come back to Eris. You know things you shouldn’t, and I’m not sure how to be around you again,”⁶ though that communication was followed by a plangent note reading “I need you. Please, come” (117; underlining in original). Not privy to this private correspondence, Becker tries to reconstruct Vanessa’s career from her diary entries and notebooks, all the while worrying about his pregnant wife Helena during his absences from home. Although aware that “Grace is hiding things from him” (157), James is astonished to learn that in Vanessa’s final days Haswell had injected her companion with morphine when cancer had metastasized to her brain. Upon divulging this secret, Grace assures Becker: “‘Everything is for her protection, you see. Everything I did, everything I do’” (179). That justification apparently extends to her having hidden three of Vanessa’s canvases, including one titled Totem, and the final painting in her Black series,⁷ which James happens to see. While preparing to leave Eris Island for the mainland on the day after a storm, he searches for his car key, but Grace has hidden it in a drawer. Before his departure, atop a granite cliff overlooking the Irish Sea, she confesses to having murdered Julian Chapman, prompting a disillusioned and repulsed Becker to regard Vanessa’s sanctuary as “a place of [...] horror” (279). Recognizing that her visitor might divulge to police what he has learned, Grace now sees that she has “gambled” by her disclosure and “Becker has lost” (283). The Blue Hour’s final pages describe how she administers morphine to her physically nauseated visitor and leaves him to drown in his car on the causeway as the incoming tide submerges it.

By virtue of its narratological complexity Hawkins’s fourth novel marks her return to the style of Into the Water and A Slow Fire Burning, but at its displaced center is the story of a woman who, much like Rachel Watson in The Girl on the Train, finds herself capable of murderous [→ page 245] violence when exploited by men, including someone as benign but opportunistic as James Becker. Before his death she contemplates what seems to her the absurdity of her situation:

Grace thinks of herself in a lot of different ways. Like anyone, she could describe herself with any number of adjectives: conscientious, hardworking, loyal, strange, lonely, unhappy, good. She is a doctor, a friend, a carer. She is a killer. She says the word quietly to herself, sounding it out. It sounds absurd, melodramatic. Protector, she thinks. Mercy killer. But kill three, she has heard, and that makes you a serial killer. She almost wants to laugh. It’s ridiculous, it’s like saying you’re a unicorn. Three strikes and you’re in. (297)

The reflection attests to Grace Haswell’s insight into the reductionism of legal categories that fail to acknowledge the complexity of human experience and motivation. Hawkins’s emotionally crippled character devotes herself unsparingly to Vanessa Chapman because she glimpses in her, at least when she is wholly immersed in an artistic project, a strong woman who can transcend or ignore the limitations of everyday life. The Blue Hour thus is consistent with Emma Roche’s recent interrogation of the reformulated romance genre in a postmillennial and postfeminist era. Because liminality figures so prominently in Hawkins’s most recent novel, it can be extrapolated to suggest where her main female characters find themselves today.