The marketing of novels has changed significantly in the past decade. Promotional videos, book blog tours, author Q&As, endorsements, competitions and giveaways are just some of the publicity-orientated content that can be seen on social media platforms in the run-up to the publication date of a book. This seems particularly true for new authors. In an increasingly crowded market, debut or emerging writers must try and differentiate themselves from the pack.
One noticeable trend in recent years (at least anecdotally from what I receive as a reviewer) has been the letter to readers, whereby an author talks about their motivations in writing the book, explains the main themes and concerns, and more often than not, divulges certain aspects of their personal life that reveal an autobiographical bent to the fiction.
So it goes with the Australian author Sara Schmidt’s author letter for her second novel, Blue Hour, which begins, “Dear Reader, there was a time when the only thing the night ever brought me were dreams which seemed to call me into the overlooked corners of my life, hold me there until I understood what I was looking at, made me realise I had unresolved… matters.” The letter goes on to detail these dreams, which involve miscarriage, motherhood, writing, creating characters, difficult pasts and mental health issues, finishing with a paragraph about how the author wants every reader to feel at least one big feeling over the course of the book.
But isn’t that the whole point of fiction, that we feel something while we’re reading? Isn’t that what all good novels should do? I confess that had I read this letter before reading Blue Hour, its earnest tone, flashes of melodrama and attempts to guide the reader may well have put me off reading the book at all.
Thankfully, I tend to leave PR material alone until I’ve written the review, because Blue Hour is a superb follow-up to Schmidt’s debut, the Women’s Prize-longlisted See What I Have Done. As with that novel, the author takes very dark subject matter – in this case, war, domestic abuse, the loss of a child – and goes deep into character to try to make sense of the chaos.
Epic suburbs
While the focus is on one fractured family, the scope is epic: suburban Australia over three decades, 1940s-1970s, encompassing both the second World War and Vietnam, the violence that is done to men on the battlefield, and the resulting carnage they bring home to their wives. The narrative is split between Kitty, a nurse who gets pregnant accidentally by solider George on the eve of him leaving to fight in the second World War, and Kitty’s daughter Eleanor, the product of an unhappy marriage, who carries the family’s many burdens on her shoulders, from childhood into adulthood and her own unhappy marriage to Leon, a handsome doctor with a sadistic streak.
To say too much about the plot of Blue Hour would spoil the twists and turns of the narrative. Schmidt’s skill as a writer is her ability to create page-turning literary fiction; it is easy to see why her debut novel drew comparisons to the author Donna Tartt. With its storylines steeped in war and violence and the randomness of life, this new novel has more than an echo of Kate Atkinson. Another touchstone is the Booker-shortlisted Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi: toxic relationships, complicated mothers, legions of hurt that get handed down through generations. Or as Schmidt would have it in Blue Hour, “the way women can break women without realising it”.
Throughout the novel, the prose is elegant and finely crafted. Schmidt writes clear, rhythmic sentences, full of cadence and inventive imagery, particularly when describing the body: “His torso a small history of the earth… that pulse between her legs: a magnet… his mouth slightly open like a storefront dummy… latticed red bruises spread across her inner thighs like Clathrus ruber.” Leon’s coercive control of Eleanor is nauseatingly real, the warning signs there from the beginning – “You think too much” – until the inevitable progression, “His way of looking: a butcher bird eyeing raw meat on the pavement.”
Blue Hour is structured in a way that will confound and surprise the reader. When we first meet Eleanor, she has taken her baby girl Amy and is making a run for the Australian wilderness, a place of solace in an otherwise brutal world. What follows is a tense, action-packed novel full of strange, sometimes surreal outcomes, which is to say, a book that delivers so much more than the promise of its author letter: “She often felt like a predator in her own body, hunting for the last remains of her old life: relics, ancient times. Think of yourself as past.”
