Mountain Devil

Recommend: Yes

Having a long term partner has ups and downs, most of which are trivial in nature. On one hand, there’s the irrational pride you might feel when your partner takes your side against a work colleague that has slighted you. I do deserve to claim that taxi at 7.45pm, you’re right! Yeah, exactly, he pretends he built that Python code, but every time I ask him to make a change, he looks at me, dumb and panicked. On the other hand, there’s the immense frustration that builds to an ugly crescendo when, while you’ve got a book open and eyes focussed on the page, he repeats endlessly, and with increasing volume, about how the grevillea might be dying. And so on, and so on, the specific instances of grievance and friendship pile up.

Now imagine the two of you are sequestered in a cold, hostile island, with only a decaying shack to keep the howling winds from eating at you, and that relationship is literally all you have.

That is what it has been like for twelve years for Aina and Whitney. Their banishment to this remote (alleged) island is a result of a transgression they committed back in civilisation.

Their relationship is the constant beat that holds Metronome together. The two characters feature on nearly every page. Even when one character is alone by themselves for a few hours, the other plays on their mind. The claustrophobic closeness is bred from their one constraint on this island: if they do not take a pill every eight hours, dispensed only at that time, they will die from the toxic spores released from ice melt. Every eight hours they must return to the house and present their thumbprints to the pill dispensary.

But the strength of the novel is that this is not a love story. It is just a really good story.

There is so much mystery in the opening twenty pages. Why have the couple been punished so severely by society? They are due very shortly for Parole, but why haven’t they heard from the Warden? Where did this lone, tame sheep with pine needles in its fleece come from, given they are on a small island alone with not a pine tree in sight?

She crouches beside the animal, placing her hand on its heaving flank. The sun glints off the hard sea. ‘Where do you think it came from?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Maybe it swam.’

‘Maybe,’ she says, unconvinced. ‘Do sheep swim?’

The pacing of the novel, I thought, was perfect. We are always learning new things about the specific situation of these two characters, and there are enough small, unsettling morsels about the broader world to make it feel like it sits within a dystopian time. Boats are washing up shipwrecked on the shore. Flocks of birds are flying North in the Winter, towards harsher weather. Back home, in civilisation, laws are not what we recognise. There is never the sense that Aina and Whitney have the full story. We learn new information at the same time they do, but are always hungry for more, always anticipating the next reveal will shed more light than the last.

So there are two elements to this novel: there’s the mystery that encapsulates this foreign world they live in, and there’s the relationship between the two.

It would be spoiling the plot to discuss the former more. The latter, though, is worth further elaboration. The relationship between Aina and Whitney is very compelling. It is complex and ever adapting. They are joint survivors, they are companions, they are lovers, they are patronised by each other, they are suspicious of each other, and they are afraid of each other, all at once. They stick together out of need, although there is the hint that they might still be partners out of choice under different circumstances. As the two ex-lovers diverge over the course of the novel, you realise the seeds of their ruin had likely begun growing in the years prior. The nuanced depiction of Aina pushing away from Whitney and Whitney resisting this was equal parts tender and tense. By the end of the novel I was impressed with the breadth of challenges the two put each other through, without devolving into melodrama.

They walk on, and she wants for conversation but any comments or remarks that she might offer seem trivial or loaded, better left unsaid.

The only dispute I have with Metronome is that a critical plot development revolves around Ania’s unwavering parental love. I found this to be a pill that was hard to swallow. To be fair, Watson attempts to balance this out elsewhere (in Whitney’s choices), but there was so much emphasis put on Ania’s perspective that it made alternates seem watered down. This is cheap padding – a mother loving her child is not an insightful or surprising character motivation – that panders to what the mass market can easily digest. I am being deliberately vague here as it is one of the early ‘reveals’ of the book.

But I forgive Tom Watson this cliche – it is an offence that is relatively small when weighed against the originality that supports the rest of the book.

Watson balanced character development with plot tension, and did so within an interesting dystopian conceit. Lesser novels would have focused too much on the climate change analogies (recall that toxic spores are being released from melting ice) and the pacing would have suffered. Lazier authors would have made Aina and Whitney a one-dimensional team, always supporting each other against external adversities. Instead we get a page turner that has real substance, not just suspense.