Content warnings: grief, death, illness, some body horror
Spoilers ahead!
There is a peculiar kind of sadness in telling a love story backwards, starting with its end. There’s the tenderness and domesticity of an established relationship, and the inevitable fact of its eventual nonexistence. This love story captures a relationship by chronicling its end. Our Wives Under the Sea, Julia Armfield’s debut novel, is a captivating tale told in alternating perspectives about a couple, Miri and Leah, the latter of whom goes out on a deep-sea exploration and comes back irrevocably changed. The book weaves Miri’s struggle to reconcile the slow slipping away of her wife, Leah, with Leah’s recounting of the events of the deep-sea submersible dive.
On my first read, I was somewhat preoccupied with the mechanics of Leah’s condition. What was happening to her, exactly? Who was behind “the Centre,” the company in charge of Leah’s deep-sea journey that she was supposedly doing for research? Why doesn’t anyone seem to act in a way that is logical by calling an ambulance, a journalist, or both? But on the second read a year later, knowing that doctors and journalists never get involved, I realized that the answers to my practical questions were besides the point and I could delve more deeply into the emotional lives of Miri and Leah. As for the questions of Leah’s research expedition and the Centre, I stopped trying to get specifics and instead wandered into explorations of the intersections between science, religion, and the supernatural that abound in the book. (My personal theory? The Centre was a religious cult and their goal was to present a human sacrifice to a deep-sea god, and all the scientific stuff was a smokescreen.)
Perhaps the most poignant thread running through the book, for me, was its depiction of grief. Miri mourns Leah when she doesn’t come back from her exploration for six months; she mourns Leah when she is back, because she came back only to fade away slowly; and she mourns her mother, who died years ago from a progressive memory disease. The act of grieving someone who has not yet passed is an incredibly difficult thing to articulate, and Armfield does it in a way that makes me want to shove the book in everyone’s faces and say “See?? Read this!!” Anyone who has lost a loved one to the slow creep of disease, who has watched them lose themselves bit by bit right in front of you, while you mourn and yet harbor impossible hope, will feel that ache echoed in this novel.
Armfield writes that “the abstract of grief is different without a body, without a point from which to hang the solid object of one’s pain.” The phrase “solid object” takes on a whole new meaning when applied to Leah, whose body is literally disintegrating in front of Miri, becoming transparent while she speaks less and less. Her condition certainly fits the description of body horror, though it is nearly bloodless. When Leah loses an eye to her strange condition, Miri describes “one of her eyes is no longer an eye but a strange, semisolid globe that on closer inspection appears to be made up of pure water. When it bursts, it falls down her face like a yolk escaping a white.”
This bears comparison to when Miri describes her mother’s condition, saying, “She ceased to obey herself, her jaw hanging loose and then tightening, skin buckling up in ways she could no longer prevent.” Like any good sci-fi/horror, Armfield reminds us that this pain isn’t hypothetical, that it doesn’t just exist in fictional worlds. She reveals the strength inherent in speculative fiction: the way it allows us to examine our own pain through the prism of unreality, thus rendering it all the more tender and real.
I will end by talking about the beginning. The opener of this book belongs in the first line hall of fame with the greats: “The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.” It tells us everything about the novel to come and also leaves so much unknown, setting up the overarching motif of how our grief haunts us and how that haunting is mirrored in both a haunted house and in the deep sea. Armfield carefully renders the mysteries of the depths of the ocean in exquisite detail, bringing together poetry and science into a brutally beautiful portrayal of love, grief, and the unknown.
Emilia Ferrante is a book-lover and writer living in Paris studying to get her Master’s degree. She is the co-host of Sapphink, a sapphic English-language book club, and loves crocheting, going on walks, and listening to the rain.
