Although the two people imprisoned on an island escape their controlling society, the life they make for themselves is hardly less restricted: Metronome by Tom Watson.
Location: post apocalyptic prison island
Metronome synopsis
Not all that is hidden is lost
For twelve years Aina and Whitney have been in exile on an island for a crime they committed together, tethered to a croft by pills they must take for survival every eight hours. They’ve kept busy – Aina with her garden, her jigsaw, her music; Whitney with his sculptures and maps – but something is not right.
Shipwrecks have begun washing up, and their supply drops have stopped. And on the day they’re meant to be collected for parole, the Warden does not come. Instead there’s a sheep. But sheep can’t swim…
As days pass, Aina begins to suspect that their prison is part of a peninsula, and that Whitney has been keeping secrets. And if he’s been keeping secrets, maybe she should too. Convinced they’ve been abandoned, she starts investigating ways she might escape. As she comes to grips with the decisions that haunt her past, she realises her biggest choice is yet to come.
Book review
Aina and Whitney come from a very controlled society in which they had to ask permission to have a child. Both deal with their captivity in different ways and in their outbursts you can clearly see a link to the society they lived in. Whitney’s sculptures are a good example of this. Memories of the past are interwoven with the present.
Prison within a prison
What happens when two people are left alone on an island for twelve years? What if their ideals grow apart? This is what happens: the society on the island begins to resemble the world outside. Metronome is about having control over something, over someone, over your own life. It is a study of their relationship and of their minds. The changes in their views gradually become stronger. What is done to them, they also did to someone else in the past and do to each other in the present. “The body’s the only real prison there is.” But is it?
Tom Watson subtly describes how things get ‘worse’. Small things become bigger. Small actions begin to have more impact. When you can only rely on each other, the other person’s beliefs gain a lot of power over you. You begin to feel more trapped the more you read. And if that’s already the case for the reader, imagine how Aina must feel. You probably feel such (silent) anger at Whitney on her behalf. How does she take it? It’s not a bad feeling, but rather one of appreciation for the writer’s writing skills.
The power of one powerless sheep
The book starts off slow, but in retrospect is perfectly paced compared to the speed of the entire story. After the appearance of one sheep, Aina begins to see things that make her question her situation on the island. You want to know what happens next: will it be something or nothing at all? I certainly did and finished the book in two sittings.
I enjoyed Metronome because of its atmosphere and the two characters who made me feel their frustration, feelings of constraint, pain and hope.
Interested?
Get your copy of Metronome from Amazon (available 31 March 2022).
Book details
Title: Metronome
Author: Tom Watson
Language: English
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Pages: 320
ISBN (13): 9781526639547
Publication date: 31 March 2022
About the author
Tom Watson was born in London in 1982. He holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, and was awarded the Curtis Brown Prize in 2018. His fiction has been shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize, received an honourable mention in the Berlin Writing Prize, and awarded runner up for the Seán O’Faoláin Short Story Competition. His first novel will be published by Bloomsbury. He lives in London with his wife and children.
Many thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing and NetGalley for a digital ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
