As Whitney and Aina keep secrets from one another, so Watson keeps secrets from us. 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.īut although the underlying mystery and sense of threat is enough to keep us engaged and turning pages, the narrative eventually becomes overreliant on the deliberate withholding of information. His use of language is nuanced and sensitive, with landscape writing especially a sensory highlight. In his debut novel, Tom Watson seems less interested in the wider political and social reality of his world than in the mundane detail of the characters’ lives and the bleakness of the landscape they inhabit, the emotional standoff that exists between them as a result of the traumatic severing of their previous existence. Watson’s use of language is nuanced and sensitive, with landscape writing especially a sensory highlight The influence of The Handmaid’s Tale is clear, though newer writers have not always been as skilful as Margaret Atwood in weaving a credible future from the stuff of now. She is desperate to learn the fate of their son, Max, and fears her husband may be keeping this knowledge to himself.ĭystopias in which the state has seized control of women’s bodies are everywhere, from Sophie Mackintosh’s Blue Ticket to Christina Dalcher’s Vox and Joanne Ramos’s The Farm. Aina, by contrast, has begun to suspect that this promise of freedom has been bogus all along. As Whitney and Aina near the end of their sentence, Whitney becomes ever more obsessed by the need to “prove loyal” in order to win parole.

The Narrative Escape by Tom Stafford