Candi's Reviews > Our Wives Under the Sea

“I feel exhausted, a feeling of catching up, a feeling of something finding me. My heart is a thin thing, these days—shred of paper blown between the spaces in my ribs.”

I can’t think of a more perfect way to phrase how I felt after reading this beautiful novel, so I might as well borrow that exquisite passage from Julia Armfield. I grabbed this book on a whim, needing an audio book to make the time pass more quickly on my little hikes in the fields behind the house. I wished for an adequate distraction, but what I found was so much more. Our Wives Under the Sea is one of the most deeply moving books I’ve read this year (or ever, really!).

“The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.”

The story begins when Miri’s wife, Leah, returns from a deep sea expedition that lasted months beyond the original plan. When she returns, it is clear that something is wrong. Miri can’t quite put her finger on it immediately, but as the story unfolds, the reader is taken on a journey to the sea floor as well as through the process of a relationship unraveling. Goodreads labels this as a horror novel, and I think that is perhaps a bit misleading. Those that expect full-on horror will be disappointed. Those that run in the opposite direction from that genre likely won’t give this a well-deserved chance. Instead, this is a deeply unsettling, introspective novel. You could take the theme of this book for what it is on the surface - the repercussions of a submarine sunk to the bottom of the ocean floor without detection for weeks on end. The trauma that resulted from this accident. Or, the reader could look at this from the bigger picture. What would it be like to have your partner become so utterly changed that the ache of that drifting apart is so raw, bewildering and unbearable? I could see this working as a metaphor for a debilitating disease as well. This is more about what the partner of the afflicted goes through, rather than the affected person him or herself.

“I look at her and feel unusually sure that the Leah of the previous night was my Leah, but that this one almost certainly isn’t. If I cut her, I’m not altogether sure she would bleed. I feel, at once, a sense of cavernous terror at being left alone and then set it aside.”

A note about the structure of this book – it was brilliant and worked exceedingly well. The voice and chapters alternate between Miri and Leah. All of Leah’s chapters are from her expedition. In this way, the reader learns a little at a time about the misadventure beneath the sea. Miri’s chapters alternate between the present time with Leah’s return and reflections of the past when she first met her partner. Some of Miri’s thoughts are about the grief of having recently lost her mother. There are some ancillary characters that aren’t greatly fleshed out but they teach us even more about Miri and Leah in the way that they interact with these friends, family and coworkers. There are so many things that could have gone wrong with this structure but consider me enormously impressed!

I want to say so much more about this little book. It was an expansive reading experience but so hard to put into words. I felt on edge, knowing that something was not right and waiting to find out exactly what was wrong. I lived Miri’s fear and dreaded anticipation. My heart was in my mouth, and then it was ripped right out. Oh, and the marine biology bits that were scattered throughout were super cool! Nothing hard for a layman like myself to grasp. Julia Armfield did some legwork in that regards as well. It’s a love story minus the sappy romance. It’s a story of transformations, and it has made a huge impact on me.

“I used to think there was such a thing as emptiness, that there were places in the world one could go and be alone. This, I think, is still true, but the error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left.”

“… loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes."