In Leah’s chapters, suffused with sea facts, we see what happened down below. During that expanse of time, we learn, Miri had no way of knowing what happened to her and limited information to go off of from the mysterious company Leah works for called The Centre. Leah has recently returned from a research trip underwater that was supposed to last three weeks and instead lasted six months. Our Wives Under The Sea alternates perspectives between wives Miri and Leah and is also broken into four sections named for the layers of the ocean, whose meanings are explained in one of Leah’s sections but whose names alone bear obvious symbolism: Sunlight Zone, Twilight Zone, Midnight Zone, Abyssal Zone, and Hadal Zone. The language in Our Wives Under The Sea is like a fork’s tines moving through perfectly cooked fish: grotesque and lovely all at once, flesh and skin pulled from bone. And yet, Armfield has written a novel so chock-full of stunning sentences that that urge to scream needled its way into me throughout my first and second reads of the book. But it’s easier to do that in the confines of a short story, harder to pull off sentence-level magic on every page of a novel where there’s more plotting and work to be done. Armfield’s first book was a collection of stories called Salt Slow and in it - especially in my favorite story, “Mantis” - her sentences are immaculate.
Scream? Because that’s how I felt reading the opening line of Our Wives Under The Sea and, if I’m being honest, how I felt reading most of Our Wives Under The Sea. In response to this opening sentence of this novel, I say…what the fuck? Do you ever read a sentence and just want to either 1. So begins Our Wives Under The Sea, Julia Armfield’s debut novel about two wives - one who went on a deep-sea submarine mission and came back wrong and one who grapples with the slowburn wreckage of her return.
“The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.” I don’t often do spoiler warnings for novels, but I know some people tend to care about these things more when it comes to anything even remotely of the horror realm, so: This Our Wives Under The Sea review contains some spoilers.
LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.
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