Horor is one of my favorite genres. My timing for picking up Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield coincided with the tragic incident of a sub going missing as they visited the ruins of Titanic. One of the protagonists in this book is a scientist who goes on deep sea explorations. On her latest trip, she returns almost five months too late and a changed person. Read on to find what this book is about and why it was a nominee for both Best Horror and Best Debut Novel in the 2022 Goodreads Choice Awards.
Our Wives Under the Sea
By Julia Armfield | Goodreads
Leah is changed. Months earlier, she left for a routine expedition, only this time her submarine sank to the sea floor. When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife Miri knows that something is wrong. Barely eating and lost in her thoughts, Leah rotates between rooms in their apartment, running the taps morning and night.
As Miri searches for answers, desperate to understand what happened below the water, she must face the possibility that the woman she loves is slipping from her grasp.
Our Wives Under the Sea – Review
I loved the writing in Our Wives Under the Sea. Haunting, reflective, depicting the heaviness that life is when things aren’t right, this book presents the tragic story of a woman welcoming her wife home after a long absence but soon realising that her wife is no longer who she used to be. What happened in the depths of the sea? Why did Leah disappear for 6 months rather than return in 3 weeks, as was the plan? Why does her body seem to be dissolving away?
Our Wives Under the Sea is a story of grief and loss, of loving someone so much and grieving them. Miri started to live in a disconnected way, watching all her routines come a slow crawl to find the answers and get her wife back. Our Wives Under the Sea is told in two perspectives: in the present, Leah has returned to Miri and Miri is trying to adjust to her wife being alive, though different. In Leah’s perspective, she speaks of her time on the submarine, the system failure they experienced and how it changed her and the two other scientists on the crew.
Let’s take a look at both our protagonists!
Leah in 4 quotes
Leah has always had a close relationship to the sea. It was a way for her and her father to bond together and as a scientist, she continues to spend time in the water. On the latest mission assigned to her by the Centre, Leah’s submarine electronic system’s failed. This meant that they were unable to contact the Centre anymore. They could not send out a beacon that they were in trouble. They had to bide their time and hope for things to get better. As a crew, they wondered how they got here, if their mission was truly to discover what was under the sea and were they part of an experiment of some sort.
I don’t remember thinking we would die, so much as noting that we wouldn’t be able to come back up again. I don’t remember thinking we could fix things, only wondering what would happen next.
Leah, Our Wives Under the Sea, Page 44
Even if we don’t go by the time, our bodies and minds are synced with the light during the day and the darkness of the night. Where I live, our summer daylight lasts as much as 15 hours. Winter days can be as short as 7 hours. With a clock and the general rhythms of our routines, life doesn’t feel very different. But in the depth of the sea, where there is no sunlight, and the digital equipment to tell the time is no longer functioning, without a measure of time Leah, Matteo, and Jelka feel the endlessness of forever. This affects them differently. While Jelka turns to spirituality, Matteo has sharp remarks to offer and Leah feels like the one keeping peace. It is a very interesting dynamic to read and a horrible situation to imagine.
All three are haunted by the blind world they have found themselves in:
It was difficult to imagine anywhere deeper than the place we had ended up.
Leah, Our Wives Under the Sea, Page 73
They each experience their own version of existential crisis.
I used to think it was vital to know things, to feel safe in the learning and recounting of facts. I used to think it was possible to know enough to escape from the panic of not knowing, but I realise now that you never learn enough to protect yourself, not really.
Leah, Our Wives Under the Sea, Page 188
Leah, in her writings of the time in the depth of the sea, thinks of Miri with fondness. She wants to be surrounded by her comfort and love but she is stuck. I admired Leah for her presence of mind and fortitude to keep herself sane in a time when she did not know anything. She had no control over where her submarine had found refuge on the sea bed and there was no way she could go out and move it. Her relationship with Leah is the tether to the world and she hopes to return to her wife.
I wanted, as it suddenly occurred to me, to be hugged more desperately than I had possibly ever wanted it.
Leah, Our Wives Under the Sea, Page 196
Miri in 4 quotes
Miri didn’t know that she would fall for a woman until she met Leah. They became precious to each other. While Miri is often contrasting how they used to be before Leah left with how they are now since Leah has come back, there is a deep longing for things to be how they used to be.
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.
Miri, Our Wives Under the Sea, Page 48
Her perspective seeped with loss and grief and what makes it harder that the subject of her grief is right in front of her. They go for therapy to reconnect and Miri’s deepest fears, anger and anxiety are revealed in Our Wives Under the Sea. Miri talks about how even the lead up to this trip was different compared to others that Leah had done with the Centre before.
The problem isn’t that she went away, it’s that nothing about her going away felt normal. It isn’t that her being back is difficult, it’s that I’m not convinced she is really back at all.
Miri, Our Wives Under the Sea, Page 53
She questions why Leah even left on a trip like this:
Why, I write, did you go if they’d told you to expect all this. What, I write, was so fascinating down there that you didn’t come back.
Miri, Our Wives Under the Sea, Page 92
Miri finds solace in her friendships but she doesn’t tell them what is really going on at home. She can’t work with the same rigour. She wants answers from the Centre that seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. She turns to online communities for help and the one for wives whose husbands have gone on interplanetary missions was fantastical and fascinating to me. She finds herself in a strange middle ground:
Grief is selfish: we cry for ourselves without the person we have lost far more than we cry for the person – but more than that, we cry because it helps. The grief process is also the coping process and of the grief is frozen by ambiguity, by the constant possibility of reversal, then so is the ability to cope
Miri, Our Wives Under the Sea, Page 107
Later, when she connects with another crew member’s family, they see patterns in how the Centre lied to all of them and what became of Jelka. Leah’s symptoms since she came back have been hard to ignore though the condition she has is unbelievable to diagnose. Miri does her best to support Leah through this time. It is so sad and she is so strong.
I loved Our Wives Under the Sea. The writing and the slice of life narrative is haunting and mundane at the same time. It has the horror of thinking we are slowly losing someone right before our eyes but maybe we have lost them already. It’s complicated. It is life. There are some unanswered questions at the end, and like with most speculative fiction, acceptance of the disbelief in the events. It may be easy to critique Miri and Leah for their choices but I chose not to.
I learned with this book that when it comes to the horror genre in particular, I need a catchy title and an appealing cover. This book did not catch my eye sooner because the cover which I kept seeing everywhere doesn’t have the horror feel I am generally willing to try. The water dripping down a mirror brings on the feelings of a haunting, rather than the absence that I feel in the sand cover! Do you prefer one cover over the other?
Have you read this book or would be interested in reading it? Find it on Goodreads.
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