The blue hour (novel)
The blue hour (English original title: The Blue Afternoon ) is the 1993 published sixth novel by William Boyd , which has won several literary awards . The German translation by Matthias Müller was published in 1995.
The blue hour is both an adventure and a detective novel and tells the story of a great, obsessive love in the turmoil of the American occupation of the Philippines and - in a framework - the belated search for a woman. The novel comprises three parts of very different lengths with a total of 59 chapters and a short prologue. The locations are Los Angeles , Manila and Lisbon . The first part in Los Angeles extends over a period of a few days in 1936, the second part over several months in 1902 and 1903 in Manila, and the third part over five days in 1936 in Lisbon.
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Los Angeles 1936:
Kay Fischer works as an aspiring architect in the Californian metropolis of Los Angeles. One day she receives a visit from an old man, a certain Dr. Salvador Carriscant who claims to be her real father. So far she had assumed that her father, an English missionary, had died in a fire in 1903 in German New Guinea - at least that is what her mother Annaliese Leys, who lives with her new husband in Venice , claims .
Carriscant convinces Kay to take him to Santa Fé to visit a certain Paton Bobby. Carriscant fails to provide an explanation, but shows Kay a photo of the wife of a diplomat who is said to be living in Lisbon. He asks Kay to accompany him to Portugal to look for this woman. Kay, who at the same time had to take a setback in her architectural career, agrees on the condition that Carriscant reveals the connections.
Carriscant is the son of the Scottish railroad engineer Archibald Carriscant and the Filipino Juliana, who worked in the Philippines. He studied medicine in Glasgow and returned to Manila in 1897 to practice medicine there.
Manila 1902:
Dr. Salvador Carriscant works at the San Jeronimo Hospital in Manila and is one of the most respected surgeons in the country, but lies with the head of the hospital, Dr. Cruz, across the board - Cruz is a staunch opponent of Carriscant's modern antiseptic surgical methods.
Carriscant is called in by US Military Police Chief Paton Bobby to investigate a murder victim, the first in a series of similar cases over the coming months in which the victims have had their hearts removed. Carriscant subsequently developed a good relationship with the American occupation forces and their leaders, while, in contrast, his anesthetist and friend Pantaleon Quiroga, an avid aviation pioneer with a self-made aircraft, seems to be involved in the Filipino resistance movement. A chance encounter between Carriscant and Delphine Sieverance, the wife of an American officer, leads to a secret relationship, ultimately a great love for which Carriscant is willing to risk everything, especially since he has become completely estranged from his wife Annaliese over the years. With the help of a risky deception he smuggles the pregnant dolphins out of the country after a few months of risky secret meetings, but is arrested shortly afterwards by Paton Bobby for the murder of Sieverance.
Lisbon 1936:
In a flashback, Kay recounts the “trial farce” against Carriscant, in which he was sentenced to twenty years in prison, sixteen of which were served in Manila and finally on Guam , although neither the murder nor a political conspiracy could be proven. She also finds out that Annaliese got pregnant after all in Manila in 1903 and that Carriscant is actually her father. Carriscant also tells her how he witnessed an American massacre of the Filipino civilian population while on a trip to see his mother, and that he also assumes that Cruz committed the murders in Manila in order to conduct experiments with human hearts .
Finally, Kay and her father go to a certain Senhora Lopes do Livio, who has been recognized by old embassy staff as the woman in the photo - she is Delphine. And she confesses to Carriscant that she murdered Sieverance back then.
Themes and motifs
As in many of Boyd's novels, the question of the relationship between chance and necessity plays a central role, of the power and influence of chance events as opposed to some kind of inevitable historical development.
Historically, much of the novel is set in the Filipino-American War - "It was an ugly little war ... in a way, it's a good thing the world forgot about it."
Awards
- 1993: Sunday Express Book of the Year
- 1995: Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
expenditure
- English original edition: The Blue Afternoon ; Sinclair & Stevenson, London 1993
- First edition in German: The Blue Hour , German by Matthias Müller; Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1995 (paperback). ISBN 3-499-13725-9
- The blue hour , same translation, Berliner Taschenbuch-Verlag 2009 (paperback). ISBN 978-3-8333-0564-1
- The blue hour , same translation, Kampa Verlag, Berlin 2020. ISBN 978-3-311-10007-2