Metronome: The 'unputdownable' BBC Two Between the Covers Book Club Pick

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Aina and Whitney are exiled together and make a life in truce while blaming each other for the loss of their child.

Until the time nine years later that the cubby is inadvertently left unlocked and a box of matches is left out. He believes that he will be guilty by association with what she has done and stubbornly clings, like a security blanket, to his belief that it’s all a test set by the Warden. The piano is central to the discovery of their 'crime' and their subsequent banishment to the island and it is a clever reminder of the time that ticks by between their eight hourly doses of medication.A tense thrilling book that confronts how prison can be torture and so you will do anything to escape. There is a storm in Metronome during my reading of it at roughly the same time as Dudley, Eunice and Franklin take hold.

Much as I enjoyed the book, I found the ending frustratingly ambiguous and open to interpretation but it didn't detract from my overall enjoyment of this debut novel. The ending is very ambiguous and I felt that the reader was invited to make up their own mind about it. She is desperate to learn the fate of their son, Max, and fears her husband may be keeping this knowledge to himself.I can imagine this working well as a play, perhaps with voiceovers or projections acting as the flashback scenes. There is no doubting Watson’s talent at the sentence level, but his lack of rigour around core ideas left me frustrated and unconvinced. What matters most is that we are fully invested in Aina and Whitney and anything or anyone else that crosses their path.

They’ve also scavenged as much as they can from the boats which wash up on the rocks surrounding the island, taking such things as mugs, waterproofs and any dried or tinned goods they can lay their hands on. Overall, while it didn’t wow me, I found ‘Metronome’ an unsettling novel and felt Tom Watson utilised his desolate setting effectively. By taking the decision to have a child without obtaining official permission, Whitney and Aina are breaking the law.Perhaps idealistic images of ‘Castaway’, ‘The Beach’ and ‘Desert Island Discs’ came rushing before I’d read Metronome. That said, as much is left to the readers imagination, the story made me think about how I might cope with the isolation and deprivation - I think I might have resorted to violence earlier than in the book! There have been reviews I’ve seen where it’s described as creepy or full of dread - I do see that, and there are parts which are hard to read as they’re upsetting, but I also thought it had some great dark humour.

Tom Watson’s chilling debut Metronome is an unsettling portrayal of a couple exiled to a remote croft, the unravelling of long-held secrets, and survival in the wilderness. As Aina starts to suspect that Whitney has known this all along, the trust between them evaporates and she starts plotting how to make a journey longer than the 8-hour window between pills.

I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere (in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living)’. A message is being conveyed about injustice or perceived wrongs, with specific use of words like “malfeasance” and “miscreants. It’s an atmospheric novel and I loved the scenes in their flooded house when they had to swim through the dark water to the pill clock. He is also masterly at depicting a slow breakdown of trust between two people who only have each other to rely on, and the conflicting pull of love and suspicion. The book is all very mysterious and there is little explanation into why permission was required to have children or what is currently going on preventing the warden from turning up.