The Blue Hour

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

The plot of the novel is set in motion by Becker’s attempt to arrive at objective truths about whether Vanessa’s sculpture contains a bone, who the bone belongs to, and what Vanessa experienced during her life. However, as events unfold, it becomes increasingly clear that truth and memory are not necessarily reliable or consistent. Facts can be altered based on selective narration, ambiguity, and outright deception. Grace does provide Becker with access and insights into her and Vanessa’s shared history, both by sharing documents and by recounting events that no one else would know about. In the case of Vanessa’s diaries and letters, Becker believes that he has access to unmediated truth about Vanessa’s experiences and state of mind; however, he fails to realize that Grace is carefully portioning and monitoring the documents to control the narrative he receives: “Grace might have given Becker the impression that the papers she’d given him were snatched haphazardly from a pile, but that wasn’t true either” (78). Grace deliberately presents the documents to portray herself in the most favorable light and to ensure that it looks as though she and Vanessa had a close and loving friendship. In reality, Vanessa, at times, was frightened, cold, and withholding.

Grace’s unreliable narration of her history with Vanessa serves a metafictional function, as it cautions the reader to be wary about the reliability of the story they are receiving. Grace leaves out or postpones key details as she narrates her history to Becker, and Hawkins uses non-linear chronology to delay key scenes and maintain suspense. Grace is also not merely selective; she outright conceals information, namely that she was the one responsible for killing Julian, destroying Vanessa’s artworks, and killing Nick Riley decades earlier. When it seems like Grace’s memories are being transparently shared with both Becker and the reader, significant details are withheld until it is too late. This narrative structure potentially reflects Grace’s self-perception: Although she knows that she has intentionally killed multiple people, she feels justified in these acts and sees herself as primarily a good person. She describes herself as “a doctor, a friend, a carer” (301).

Grace’s narrative is largely revealed to have been compromised and unreliable, but Hawkins furthers the subjective nature of truth and memory in the narrative by leaving some lingering ambiguities. Becker is shocked by Grace’s assumption that Emmeline intentionally shot and killed her husband, but this assumption on Grace’s part is never disproven. Much of the context that is revealed about Emmeline and Douglas’s marriage supports the idea that Emmeline could have purposefully killed her husband, but the narrative never confirms anything. Likewise, it seems that Becker’s suspicions about Helena and Sebastian might be a figment of his imagination and self-doubt, but an unusual message that he receives from Helena in error suggests that these fears could be valid. Even whether Becker dies at the end of the novel is not completely clear. These fundamental ambiguities underscore that the truth may not be as evident or clear-cut as it seems.