Our Wives Under the Sea

What is grief, if not the sea persevering?

The last time I read a horror novel that explored grief, it was John Langan???s The Fisherman???s Wife, which I enjoyed thoroughly and found appropriately spooky. So when this book cropped up in some best-of lists this year, and many of the reviews implied or out right stated this was a horror novel, I decided to give it a shot.

And yes, yes, it IS a horror novel, but not quite in the same way as Langan???s book. No: the horror here is in watching the slow deterioration of a relationship/relationships, something indefinable hanging between everyone that no one can seem to get over or around. And the thing is: it???s neither of their faults. On one hand, how do you explain a profoundly traumatic experience to someone? An experience that has changed you so fundamentally, that it might feel like you???re someone else entirely? And on the other hand, how do you try to understand what your partner is going through in the wake of a traumatizing event? How do you reach out to them, ask them to open up, without accidentally cutting them, or yourself, on the sharp edge of a memory? How do two people deal with the weight of all that? How do you keep a relationship from just???disintegrating? 

In broad strokes, that???s what happens in this novel. The story is told via first-person narration with both Miri and Leah as narrators, the chapters alternating between them. On one hand, Miri???s chapters are mostly set in the present, drifting back and forth to explore her past as it relates to the present of her and the just-returned Leah. It is in Miri???s chapters that the themes of grief and grieving are most pronounced, and it is both heartwrenching and nightmarish to read about how she deals with Leah, and her notion that maybe, her wife didn???t quite come back as herself. There???s a kind of slow, inexorable awakening in these chapters that feels terrifying, because you can see how Miri realizes that something is coming, KNOWS it???s inevitable, but isn???t sure yet what she???ll do. She???s failed before, after all. Will she fail again?

As for Leah???s chapters, this is where the horror story side of the novel comes in, which I won???t get into for fear of spoilers, but they feel very cosmic horror-esque - and no, NOT because of the obvious Cthulhu references. These chapters are slow too, like the Miri chapters, but the flavor of terror here is different: a slow descent (heh) into the unknown, into madness (?), into thoughts that are maybe best left in the depths of the mind. What???s down there in the very deepest depths of the ocean? Who knows. What lies in the very deepest depths of the human mind? Who knows. Do we want to know? SHOULD we know?

Taken all together, these chapters twine and twist and twist and TWIST so the tension???s almost unbearable, until finally, towards the book???s latter fourth, they finally snap and unravel into the conclusion. That the POV makes everything feel twice as intimate and maybe a tiny bit claustrophobic - which I personally enjoyed, mostly because of how uncomfortable it was to see all this happening. I know that seems strange, but the up-close feel really made this even more compelling to read. This is helped along by the writing, which is lovely right from the get-go and makes reading this book immensely easy for all that the story feels like it should be going a lot more slowly than it actually does. 

I felt the same way as Ellie's Review.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4799609878

3.5

it was really well written but at first it was a little confusing and I'm annoyed at the end. I wanna know exactly what happened :(

but all in all, some beautiful quotes

4.7:

An eerie story as October is coming to a close! I've been thinking about it all through the week. It's the second I've read this month regarding a sea creature but the difference is that this one is so beautifully written, and I actually DID care about the characters.

I could feel my submechanophobia, growing from a casual fear at the back of my mind, to an unsettling thought at the forefront, constantly. I wonder what was going through Leah's mind as it all faded.

There's something about grief and letting go that I'm pretty sure I'm just too dumb to grasp. And it's still not completely clear to me how things came to be as they were at the end, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and want to look more into Julia's work.

This was weird and beautiful, I loved how ominous it was and how the two story threads come together perfectly. The ending was impeccable as well. We need more queer stories like this where queerness isn't the focus, but just part of the backdrop.

2.5/5 - This book was really well written but just unfortunately not for me! I think the problem was I went into it expecting it be something that it's not.
I didn't find the storyline particularly captivating, huge chunks of the book are about the 2 characters reflecting on the loss of their parents and I found it took away from the main plot.
Furthermore, any attempt of explanation to what was actually going on in the submarine and subsequent events were all annoying vague, which was a real shame for me.
However, I did find this book was really well written and enjoyed how the plot was split into different deeper oceanic layers as it progressed.
Will I pick up another one of Armfield's work? Unsure.

This novel made me feel so much and yet I can't really say what emotions. It was beautifully written and not in such a confusing way as many short novels always seem to start. I was very invested in the story and the characters were all very interesting.  It was as much about grief and loss as it was about love. 

I honestly don't know how to feel, perhaps because I can't easily fit a theme or a point to the story as I usually would. It's as if the point was just to make me feel. 

Can't wait to see what this author does next, I was a big fan of both this and her book of short stories!

This book is definitely not for everyone - it's a slow, almost meditative book and it doesn't exactly tie up neatly at the end - but I really enjoyed it. Miri's wife Leah was missing for months after her submarine mission for a mysterious oceanography centre went awry (or did it??), and upon her miraculous return, she's changed in some pretty fundamental ways. The book is divided into sections where Miri is dealing with her grief and frustration in the present, and where Leah is telling the story of what happened on the mission in the past.

I do wish that Leah had gotten a POV chapter in the present, and a few of Miri's chapters had some weird biphobia for no real reason, but other than that I loved it. 

too tedious & boring, can't do this. i guess its a “its not you, its me” moment

A short and sweet novel that is beautifully written and haunting. I saw this toted as ‘Annihilation but gay' which, while it made me laugh, isn't entirely off the mark. Plus, Annihilation is one of my favourite horror novels so anything that can be compared to it is a bonus in my eyes.

Like Annihilation, it begins with a partner returning to a wife after a long absence due to a mission gone wrong, and their behaviour is erratic and changed afterward. Plot wise, (from what I remember of Annihilation - it's been a few years) ‘Our Wives Under the Sea' is different after the initial concept. We get point of view sections alternating between Miri and Leah (the wife under the sea). We get the before, the during, and the after. Yet tonally it remains similar, with a familiar sense of eerie creeping dread. This is so short, I don't want to say more because of spoilers, but Julia Armfield really succeeds in packing an emotional wallop.

What I will say though, is that this is ultimately a novel about grief and love, and how those two things are intrinsically linked. It is less interested in explaining how, or why, than using horror and the ocean to explore such themes in a way that manages to be both profoundly tender and unsettling.

First of all, yes, this is a singularly strange book: Miri's beloved wife Leah has finally returned from a deep-sea exploration gone wrong, and she seems to slowly but surely be turning into some kind of ocean creature. The story alternates between Miri's and Leah's perspectives, but we never hear from Leah once she surfaces - we only learn, in bits and pieces that jigsaw-puzzle together around holes never quite filled in, what might have happened in that dark and crushing pressure at the bottom of the sea.

If pushed to describe it, I'd say imagine vestiges of the plot from Dr. Franklin's Island (Ann Halam), with the stunned disbelief - articulated in the most hauntingly beautiful ways - of finding oneself in a completely new reality from Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel), with amassing undertones of the amorphous dread so compellingly conveyed in Leave the World Behind (Rumaan Alam).

While the plot is extraordinary in every sense of the word, the story manages to be deeply, heartbreakingly relatable. Ambiguous loss - the specific type of grief you feel when the person you love still exists, in a sense, but isn't the same - is universal, and this eerie and beautiful book is fundamentally about it.

I loved this book and believe it will be one of the most-discussed, most-acclaimed of 2022.

I liked this one a lot. It is a slow, sad, book about the various ways we can disintegrate, with an intriguing central mystery at is heart.