A review by thebigemmt505
Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield

dark emotional mysterious slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

“I want whoever reads this to understand what they’re getting, which is mainly confusion, because I don’t know how to be clear about any of this.” 

Our Wives Under The Sea follows a couple, Leah and Miri, trying to (or, well, not really trying to) navigate life after Leah comes back from a submarine expedition gone awry. Typically, in a review, I’d first explain all the positives that stand out to me in a book- of which there are… some. The premise is immensely intriguing and there are beautiful descriptions throughout much of the novel. There’s plenty of purposeful mystique around what happened to Leah and why she refuses to talk about it. The treatment of grief, as long as it takes, is ultimately tragic as it is poignant. The clever moments are clever, with symbols and motifs that recur in a way that makes the pattern recognition in one’s brain go “oh, right, cool!” My snark has kicked in already though, and I must unfortunately explain why this book massively disappointed me. 

It’s underwhelming. The book slogs through long chapters of Miri droning on about ultimately irrelevant information, interspersed with tiny chapters that hint at the strange and horrifying nature of Leah’s expedition. The theme is obviously all about grief, its tears stained across each page Miri talks about distracting herself, living on autopilot, trying to grieve someone still alive in the bath next to her. It’s unfortunately only at the end of the book that this works. Everything before mimics the feeling of a slow drip of water on my forehead, startling me as I try to keep my eyes open for another chapter of Miri explaining the same day she’s had four times over. When something finally does happen, it’s skipped, and Miri simply does not explain or acknowledge anything going on. It’s absolutely infuriating to read. Grief is hollow of but that doesn’t mean writing about it has to be equally empty. 

How about the characters themselves? There is, of course, plenty of reminiscing about Miri and Leah’s relationship, which might’ve been sweet if not for the fact the writing made me want to drown myself. To elaborate, if the characterization of characters in a piece of media relies only on the other media they consume, the characters are not well written. There are moments in these scenes where it’s multiple sentences full of cultural references to the point I never got to know the characters as anything more than a list of interests and attributes told plainly and never shown organically. The characters never grow to feel like characters, the plot never fleshes out to feel like a plot, and all of the talent in between the lines of this novel is drained away, ineffective, because of these two facts. 

To put aside my crassness, there is lots of potential here. When the author isn’t trying too hard to be clever, or impressive, or knowledgeable, she has a talent for everything emotional. If this had been a short story where the last quarter took up half of the book, I’d be giving this a much higher rating. I’m genuinely saddened I didn’t enjoy this one. 

At the end of the day, Our Wives Under The Sea is that empty abyss at the bottom of the ocean. As Leah says when the lights finally do turn on in that submarine, all I could think reading this book was “come on, give.” 

Give it a read if you want. I might just be a cunt. Frankly, though, I think Iron Lung accomplished what this book meant to (minus all of the grief) in about 30-40 minutes of gameplay maximum. (If you know, you know.) 


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