A review by cloreadsbooks1364
Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield

dark emotional mysterious reflective sad fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

“In the sea there's no such thing as a natural horizon, no place for the line of the sky to signify an end. When you sink - which we did, long hours of sinking - you can't see the bottom and you can't see the top and the ocean around you extends on both sides with no obvious limit except the border around your own window. The earth and its certain curvature becomes far less clear underwater.”

Undoubtedly my favourite book of this year, potentially my favourite book of all time, I first read Our Wives Under the Sea in March 2024. I intended to review it, then gave up after quickly realising that I would never do its absolute magnificence justice. Now that I recently permitted myself to be enveloped in this stunning novel once again, I am determined to write a review that will convince you to get your hands on this book as soon as possible. If it isn’t clear yet, this was a 5-star read for me. This review will contain spoilers in some paragraphs, but I will warn you.

Storygraph labels this novel as horror and science-fiction, but at its heart I view it as a tale merging romance and grief. Also, the horror is tame enough that I never even considered that it might be categorized as such while reading it, either time. Our Wives Under the Sea revolves around a couple, Miri and Leah. Leah has returned from a deep-sea research expedition which left her stranded in a submarine on the ocean floor for 6 months (it was supposed to be a 3-week-long trip). We jump back and forward to Leah’s experience underwater and Miri dealing with the realisation that, while Leah is now home, she has changed greatly and is gradually slipping away.

The sci-fi aspect is (SPOILERS) present as we observe through Miri how Leah slowly changes into water (or a water-dwelling wisp of a creature, its never explained). Here is the entire process chronologically- she bleeds from her skin, stops eating and drinking (except for salt in water), her skin becomes “a drifting texture” flowing from white to blue to green, she can breathe underwater as she struggles to in air, and one of her eyes bursts into water. I suppose this may be where the horror comes from, but there developments didn’t disgust or even startle me as a reader, just increased the sombreness.

“When something bad is actually happening, it's easy to underreact, because a part of you is wired to assume it isn't real. When you stop underreacting, the horror is unique because it is, unfortunately, endless.”

Through Leah’s chapters, we experience the months stuck below the surface. The suspicious Centre seems to shut off all power on the craft during the descent, but it lands gently on the ocean floor and contains enough supplies to last the three explorers for the six months? We never learn what their motive was, what they were actually investigating, why they kept Leah in quarantine for weeks after her ascent. This is because it doesn’t matter to Miri, she only cares about her wife, who she is losing. “I find that if I squint at the television hard enough, it's easier to think about things other than how much I miss my wife.”

From Miri we learn about the love between the women, how their relationship developed, the intimacy and trust between them. “…the feeling when we spoke for the first time that there were vast places in the world that I had never yet thought to go.” It’s so beautiful, but bittersweet when combined with what’s happening to Leah. Miri is mourning the loss of her wife, while she is physically still there, she is a shell of her former self, barely speaking or moving, devoid of much personality. In bringing us through their life together, she is accepting that she must let Leah go.

“I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes… It's easy to understand why someone might love a person but far more difficult to push yourself down into that understanding, to pull it up to your chin like bedclothes and feel it settling around you as something true.”

This book has a beautiful writing style, quite lyrical and totally mesmerising. It’s hard to explain the extent to which it captures your attention, drags you down until you must force yourself painstakingly to put the book down. The constant tone is that of sorrow, but also fairly peaceful, unusual in a horror novel.

It is split into sections, the various stages of the ocean’s depth. We begin in “the Epipelagic, or Sunlight Zone”, where we are introduced to the characters whom we will soon become attached to. Next is “the Mesopelagic, or Twilight Zone”, followed by “the Bathypelagic, or Midnight Zone” and “the Abyssopelagic, or Abyssal Zone”. Finally, unfortunately, we reach “the Hadalpelagic, or Hadal Zone” where we must abandon the story gently to sob for a while, empathising with Miri as she grieves Leah and will have to learn how to live without her, though in a way she already has been.

Our Wives Under the Sea leaves me unbearably sad, but tranquil, as I am content that Armfield gave Leah and Miri the ideal conclusion possible in such a gorgeous fashion, no matter how sad it is (irrevocably sad). While I somehow didn’t cry after reading it the second time, I felt emotionally raw and fragile, internally wailing with sorrow for the characters.

When I first purchased this book, I started at it for three months, putting off reading a book that I was certain would haunt me for a long time. I also waiting longer than intended to reread it, nervous to write this review. On a more light-hearted note, I somehow managed to not notice both times the short blurb “One of my favourite writers” by none other than Florence Welch (AKA. Florence + The Machine, one of my favourite artists). This book did have a similar atmosphere to her songs (particularly The End of Love, Girls Against God, and the demo version of How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful) as both are extremely memorable with extraordinary poetic talent.

How to finish a review of such a novel? Maybe by imploring you to read it, unless of course you are triggered by any of the below warnings. If you enjoy torturing yourself with novels encasing the endless ache of grief within exquisite writing, do give it a go.

Trigger Warnings (from Storygraph): body horror (graphic), grief, confinement, parent death, death, suicide, lesbophobia (minor)

“It is easier, I guess, to believe that life is inexhaustible…. To stamp a limit on even the most tedious of things is to acknowledge reality in a way that amounts to torture. In truth, we will only perform any action a certain number of times, and to know that can never be helpful. There is, in my opinion, no use in demanding to know the number, in demanding to know upon waking the number of boxes to be ticked off every single day. After all, why would it help to be shown the mathematics of things, when instead we could simply imagine that whatever time we have is limitless.”
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