Early word on Paula Hawkins’ latest, “The Blue Hour,” compares it to Agatha Christie. But when the “The Girl on the Train” novelist hears it likened to Daphne Du Maurier, instead, she immediately concurs.
“I certainly had those stories in my head,” said Hawkins of Du Maurier, whose novels include “The Birds,” “Rebecca” and “Jamaica Inn” (all of which became Alfred Hitchcock films). “I reread some of the stories when I was writing this, things like ‘The Birds.’ Everyone always thinks about the movie, but the story it comes from is really, really bleak and terrifying and feels very prescient about environmental change.”
One point of kinship between Du Maurier and Hawkins — who will be at Southdale Public Library Oct. 29 for a reading and conversation — is the Gothic, moody setting of “Blue Hour.” Like the storm-tossed waves in both “The Birds” and “Rebecca,” “Blue Hour” owes its atmosphere to the sea. It’s mostly set on a western Scottish island that’s only connected to the mainland 12 hours a day because its causeway is underwater the rest of the time.
“I’d been thinking about the tidal island idea for a while,” said Hawkins. “I went on a holiday to France years ago, and I was walking on the coast and there were these little tidal islands and there’d be just one little house on them. It did strike me there were storytelling possibilities there: the locked-room idea, and you can’t get to it because of the tide.”
A setting led to a character.
“What kind of person would choose to live there, completely at the mercy of the tide and the weather?” asked Hawkins. “I’d been thinking I’d like to write something about an artist who did seem like someone who might like to cut themselves off from the world.”
The two main characters — in fact, practically the only characters in the claustrophobic novel — are an eccentric named Vanessa, who may have created a sculpture that includes a human bone, and a former doctor named Grace, who cares for Vanessa. A gallerist who visits them has a difficult time imagining why they want to live in the middle of nowhere. It’s an idea that may occur to readers, too.
“If you look at Vanessa, obviously she’s attracted to this idea of freedom, this wild place where she can work,” said Hawkins, who grew up in what’s now Zimbabwe, went to school in England and calls Edinburgh, Scotland, home. “But I think you’re right that she becomes shaped by it, too. Someone who lives a solitary life — that will start to inform how they behave, how they relate to each other, whether they correctly read signals from other people.”
