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The book is short and very pacy, with a lot in it to hold my interest and I finished it in two sessions on a particularly long train journey. Also the idea that people would wait 12 years before doing something further about their situation is also unbelievable. These are dispensed via an automated “pill clock”, activated by the thumb print of the designated user, keeping the miscreants effectively tethered to their place of exile. Aina and Whitney are sentenced to 12 years banishment, for a crime that increasingly becomes apparent - they had an illegal child.
The specific episode discussing the book has not yet aired as of mid-May 2022, (NOTE: These are only available for listening in the United Kingdom) but you can watch for it in the list of Between the Covers episodes here. Random elements are introduced which offer more depth to the world building but little advancement of any kind of story. Set on a remote island this book plays with the theme of isolation, building a compact world cantered around predominantly two characters. They are tethered to the island by the need to take a pill every 8 hours and if they don’t take it, they die.His imagining of the sparse and chilly beauty of the island, together with the exiles’ thwarted attempts to make creative sense of both their fate and their surroundings, should make for an engrossing and memorable reading experience. I have fully crafted a 3d Revolving island in my head where I can see characters arriving and living on the island. It suggested a story of survival and hardship, a situation which require out-of-the-box thinking and the island setting itself promised a mystery to unravel.
As a condition of their stay, they must take a pill that is dispensed every 8 hours or they die, however their date of parole is coming up and they will soon be free – or will they? Although they've made preparations to leave because their sentence is over, their messages to the warden are going unheard. So it became more a case of accepting its scenario where the characters play out their parts for dramatic effect.
They are trapped by geography, and by an apparently poisoned environment: they each have to take a pill every eight hours that is only dispensed from a physical, unmovable, unfathomable structure in their crofting cottage. For this reader, at least, the vastness and profusion of plot holes and the relentlessly accelerating illogic that governs the final quarter of the novel explode any such necessary suspension of disbelief. While I enjoyed it, I never managed to feel that drawn to the characters, their stilted nature kept them at arm’s length so I couldn’t feel too invested in their future. Is the freedom for themselves or for someone else; do you give up your freedom for the sake of another? The flashbacks in Metronome are drip-feeding information you're really keen to learn - in this case why Aina and Whitney ended up on the prison island - and the reveal fell flat for me, personally, as did the reveal of Whitney's long-held secret.
The claustrophobic feel of two people spending all of their time together, with no other human company is chilling, and the little niggles of doubt and blame between them, that grow with an intensity throughout is impeccably handled. What matters most is that we are fully invested in Aina and Whitney and anything or anyone else that crosses their path. The plot started to get lost somewhere around the middle though and only really regained its footing in the final third only to end with such disappointing ambiguity.And on her re-discovery of a hand-illustrated map, “the scale is all wrong, the distances too great. Aina’s creator, Tom Watson, now billed by Bloomsbury as a literary star of 2022, is a graduate of University of East Anglia (UEA) in creative writing, where he won the Curtis Brown Prize.
The pace and intensity increases as the story goes on, with an almost unbearable crescendo until the breathless last line. The connection to the sculptures is not obvious at first but once the connection is made, coupled with Whitney’s own artworks, it is explosive. The setup is that a couple, Aina and Whitney have been in exile on a supposed island for 12 years for the crime in their future dystopian society of conceiving a child without a permit. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed this book, perhaps because it didn’t serve up everything to me on a plate. Except we do not know if she is alone, what lunch consisted of, what kind of dishes they are and how many, where the sink is, where she is, or what happened before.The betrayal by someone the mc thought she could trust, and her struggle with sensing this from the beginning, and the not knowing if she should trust. Metronome by Tom Watson is the debut novel about Aina and Whitney, two individuals who were in exile for a crime they committed. I would have liked a little more explanation as to why these rules had come into existence and also how the punishment system was supposed to work, as well as a little more information about the pills. Just like the great Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale, this author doesn't inform the reader of how the world becomes what it is in this story. Her work has regularly been published on Friday Flash Fiction (which also appears on Twitter) and has appeared on Paragraph Planet and several collections of new writing.
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