Our Wives Under the Sea
by Julia Armfield
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Description
"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 show more grasp. By turns elegiac and furious, wry and heartbreaking, Our Wives Under the Sea is a genre-bending exploration of the depths of love and grief at the heart of a marriage"-- show lessTags
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Member Recommendations
Charon07 Both are at heart love stories and, while they contain fantastical elements, might be disappointing to those who are expecting science fiction or horror. But if you want sad, strange, and beautiful stories that explore what it is we love when we love someone, these are both good choices.
Member Reviews
The Publisher Says: 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.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: First, read this:
Don't think for a moment that this is ever an easy book to read. It's not long, only 240pp, or probably 85,000 to 90,000 words. It's a supremely effective exercise in lovely phrase-making that adds up to an eerie atmospheric story of two women in a marriage based on so many broken places and invisibly tiny hooks on long, thin, almost undetectable filaments that intertwine with the other's reaching filaments...no telling whose reach in, whose reach out, the effect still mimics velcro for the soul.
I felt my impatience with Miri, the wife on land, wax and wane several times during the read...in life I'd find Miri intolerable...and I found Leah more and more relatable, as the quote above could've been ripped out of my mind and prettied up some to be Leah's voice. I understood these two women being together, and I understood why Author Armfield introduced a new Leah-like character to be active for Miri the passive, the sea-like all-absorbing heatless Miri. I understood...but I didn't love.
Too much of what happened reminded me of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, possibly more the filmed version than the book. Too many things left off, dangling conversations like the one in the ancient Simon & Garfunkel song. The eerieness of it is very close to ennui at times, Leah speaks of exhaustion that feels bottomless and that unfortunately is what I took away from this read.
But oh my goddesses, the beautiful phrases. The beautiful, beautiful phrases, the concepts caught in their gem facets, oh my goddesses. Give me that all day long. I promise I won't complain a peep about the "plot". show less
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.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: First, read this:
The space around us is a claw half grasped, holding tight without quite crushing, and I wish, in the idle way I always wish these days,show more
that I felt more confident in my ability to breathe.
–and–
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.
–and–
Her tone is perfectly reasonable, even kind. Beneath it, however, there is little enough in the way of feeling, a chilly blank where the rest of her voice, as I know it, should be.
Don't think for a moment that this is ever an easy book to read. It's not long, only 240pp, or probably 85,000 to 90,000 words. It's a supremely effective exercise in lovely phrase-making that adds up to an eerie atmospheric story of two women in a marriage based on so many broken places and invisibly tiny hooks on long, thin, almost undetectable filaments that intertwine with the other's reaching filaments...no telling whose reach in, whose reach out, the effect still mimics velcro for the soul.
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 realize now that you can never learn enough to protect yourself, not really.
I felt my impatience with Miri, the wife on land, wax and wane several times during the read...in life I'd find Miri intolerable...and I found Leah more and more relatable, as the quote above could've been ripped out of my mind and prettied up some to be Leah's voice. I understood these two women being together, and I understood why Author Armfield introduced a new Leah-like character to be active for Miri the passive, the sea-like all-absorbing heatless Miri. I understood...but I didn't love.
Too much of what happened reminded me of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, possibly more the filmed version than the book. Too many things left off, dangling conversations like the one in the ancient Simon & Garfunkel song. The eerieness of it is very close to ennui at times, Leah speaks of exhaustion that feels bottomless and that unfortunately is what I took away from this read.
But oh my goddesses, the beautiful phrases. The beautiful, beautiful phrases, the concepts caught in their gem facets, oh my goddesses. Give me that all day long. I promise I won't complain a peep about the "plot". show less
If you've ever gone under the sea (in my case scuba rather than a submarine), you know there's something different about breathing and being under the water. There's a slowing down, a muffling, that occurs. It is a place of metamorphosis. The deeper you go the more otherworldly it becomes. And because we know so little about the ocean and its inhabitants, it is the perfect place to set a nightmare. In Julia Armfield's brooding and melancholy novel Our Wives Under the Sea, she uses this unknowing and vague sense of menace as two wives confront the aftermath of one of the women's submarine voyage gone wrong, how they are both changed by this trauma, and a mourning for what was, and what continues to be, lost.
Miri and Leah are treading show more water, drifting around each other in an increasingly silent apartment. Leah is a deep sea researcher who was on a submarine that was meant to be gone for 3 weeks but was unexpectedly gone for 6 months. Leah's wife, Miri, doesn't know how to help Leah process the trauma she experienced when the sub lost power and sank to the bottom of the ocean. Leah doesn't know how to, or can't, tell Miri what happened down there. And so the two women repeat their actions over and over and over again in a hopeless loop. Miri calls the Centre (Leah's employer) to try and get ahold of a person who can help Leah, and perhaps her as well. Leah floats in the bath, water running all the time, her body changing, vomiting water, bleeding from her mouth, and her skin silvering, almost translucent. Both of them are aimless with grief and loss and Leah is increasingly disassociated from this terrestrial life.
The novel is narrated in the first person, alternating between Miri, who tells of their history together and her futile efforts to find "her Leah" instead of this stranger who has returned from 6 months away, and Leah, who tells the reader, but not Miri, the story of what happened to her and to her fellow scientists down in the depths of the ocean. The story is also broken into the oceanic zones: sunlight, twilight, midnight, abyssal, and hadal so the reader knows that things will get darker and more unknowable as the story goes on. This is an essentially plotless, character driven meditation. It is unsettling and surreal in tone. There are many unanswered questions: why is the sub supplied with enough food to last 6 months when the voyage was supposed to be 3 weeks? Why do the upstairs neighbors leave their tv on at all hours and what do the banal shows they watch signify for this marriage that is slowly disintegrating? What is that sound under the water? And how do you grieve someone still present? There is a sort of dreamy horror to this novel which kept me awkwardly distanced from the story. Very little actually happens over the short course of the book and the two women's voices were nigh indistinguishable. The slow moving plot and the endless repetition, like waves rolling out at sea, never getting nearer to shore, turned this into something of a struggle to pick back up after I put it down. In fact, I found I had to reread sentences even right in the middle of the story because I had zoned out completely and not absorbed anything. Everything, characters and plot both, felt vague and strangely insubstantial. I so very much wanted to like this more than I did. Others have raved about it though so perhaps I missed something vital. If you read it, expect no answers to any questions, not in the beginning, the middle, and certainly not in the end. show less
Miri and Leah are treading show more water, drifting around each other in an increasingly silent apartment. Leah is a deep sea researcher who was on a submarine that was meant to be gone for 3 weeks but was unexpectedly gone for 6 months. Leah's wife, Miri, doesn't know how to help Leah process the trauma she experienced when the sub lost power and sank to the bottom of the ocean. Leah doesn't know how to, or can't, tell Miri what happened down there. And so the two women repeat their actions over and over and over again in a hopeless loop. Miri calls the Centre (Leah's employer) to try and get ahold of a person who can help Leah, and perhaps her as well. Leah floats in the bath, water running all the time, her body changing, vomiting water, bleeding from her mouth, and her skin silvering, almost translucent. Both of them are aimless with grief and loss and Leah is increasingly disassociated from this terrestrial life.
The novel is narrated in the first person, alternating between Miri, who tells of their history together and her futile efforts to find "her Leah" instead of this stranger who has returned from 6 months away, and Leah, who tells the reader, but not Miri, the story of what happened to her and to her fellow scientists down in the depths of the ocean. The story is also broken into the oceanic zones: sunlight, twilight, midnight, abyssal, and hadal so the reader knows that things will get darker and more unknowable as the story goes on. This is an essentially plotless, character driven meditation. It is unsettling and surreal in tone. There are many unanswered questions: why is the sub supplied with enough food to last 6 months when the voyage was supposed to be 3 weeks? Why do the upstairs neighbors leave their tv on at all hours and what do the banal shows they watch signify for this marriage that is slowly disintegrating? What is that sound under the water? And how do you grieve someone still present? There is a sort of dreamy horror to this novel which kept me awkwardly distanced from the story. Very little actually happens over the short course of the book and the two women's voices were nigh indistinguishable. The slow moving plot and the endless repetition, like waves rolling out at sea, never getting nearer to shore, turned this into something of a struggle to pick back up after I put it down. In fact, I found I had to reread sentences even right in the middle of the story because I had zoned out completely and not absorbed anything. Everything, characters and plot both, felt vague and strangely insubstantial. I so very much wanted to like this more than I did. Others have raved about it though so perhaps I missed something vital. If you read it, expect no answers to any questions, not in the beginning, the middle, and certainly not in the end. show less
“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.”
Truly a niche read. It’s slow and wandering between two POVs of a married couple, slithering between timelines. It’s visceral and existential with just enough to hold you into the here and now. The ocean in of itself is terrifying to me, so the one woman’s love and connection to it was uncomfortable to me which was exciting. Her wife is barely hanging on, trying to hold onto who her wife was before she was lost under sea. It poses a lot of interesting show more theories, bodily transformations and trying to remember the person you love through memories of who they once were. Not what I was searching for at the time or the type of genre I specifically seek out but was still very well written. show less
Truly a niche read. It’s slow and wandering between two POVs of a married couple, slithering between timelines. It’s visceral and existential with just enough to hold you into the here and now. The ocean in of itself is terrifying to me, so the one woman’s love and connection to it was uncomfortable to me which was exciting. Her wife is barely hanging on, trying to hold onto who her wife was before she was lost under sea. It poses a lot of interesting show more theories, bodily transformations and trying to remember the person you love through memories of who they once were. Not what I was searching for at the time or the type of genre I specifically seek out but was still very well written. show less
The biggest question is what happens to a marriage when the person you married is no longer the person you married? Leah and Miri find themselves having to come to terms with that question. The two women had always had a conventional marriage of mostly comfortable routine. They shared a love of movies, and genuine happiness at having actually found each other. Then Leah, who is a marine scientist, goes on a three-week submarine expedition on which things go disastrously wrong. She and her shipmates disappear for six months to the bottom of the ocean. Most of the story from here is in Miri’s narrative which is composed mostly from excerpts from Leah’s diary of the mission. We learn of their growing awareness and grudging management show more of the changes and relationship losses they both endured as a result of their prolonged separation. Although Leah returns home, things do not go as Miri had envisioned. From the time of her return there has been an unanticipated transformation, a terrifying dissolution of her human form into something unfamiliar and strange which heavily challenges Miri’s assumptions about the course of what their life was to be for them together. Life for them grows deeper and darker as the novel slowly reveals that the horrific situation Leah tolerated may not have been as accidental as it first was revealed to be. The unearthly circumstances of Leah’s underwater captivity and mutation are horrible enough, but take on new meaning in relation to other, more understandable situations Miri has faced in her life...the metamorphosis her mother underwent during a fatal illness and the sometimes-irritating voices she hears constantly emanating from an unseen neighbor’s television. Is Leah's current circumstance just further along the lines associated with human understanding of loss and endurance...or is it something much less understood or expected? The author does a great job of guiding the reader through the unsure and unexpected parts of the couple’s lives and even sometimes approaching them with ironic humor. We see that the bleakest horror story can often also be a love story. show less
4.75 stars. the writing in this book is absolutely stunning. i really loved this, right from the start, and it only continued to awe me as it went.
i think a lot of people will read this as a book of horror or science fiction and maybe that's what it is. but to me it's one giant metaphor for how we live when someone we love changes. whether that's just people who change separately so the relationship doesn't fit anymore, or something happens to change someone like a trauma or accident, or if someone transitions maybe. there are so many ways this can be true, and that's why i love reading it this way. we change in all sorts of ways, so many of which could be antithetical to the relationship that worked so well before. maybe it can still show more work, but maybe it can't. and what does it look like as you figure that out? i think it looks kind of like this. for most of the book i thought that miri was unrealistically passive. i wanted to yell at her to just do something, anything, but really, i don't know what's more realistic than being frozen with uncertainty, want, and sadness, as you see the world you had made crumbling. as someone who freezes under pressure myself, i should have given her more leeway throughout the book. i can see just moving forward while trying to hold on to whatever you can of the past and the person you love, not knowing what to do, until you do.
"I see my mother in myself, though less in the sense of inherited features and more in the sense of an intruder poor hidden behind a curtain."
"My heart is a thing thing, these days -- shred of paper blown between the spaces in my ribs."
the only line i didn't like and that really rubbed me the wrong way: "The problem with relationships between women is that neither one of you is automatically the wronged party, which frankly takes a lot of the fun out of an argument." this felt way too pat and frankly not worthy of the rest of the book this is in. show less
i think a lot of people will read this as a book of horror or science fiction and maybe that's what it is. but to me it's one giant metaphor for how we live when someone we love changes. whether that's just people who change separately so the relationship doesn't fit anymore, or something happens to change someone like a trauma or accident, or if someone transitions maybe. there are so many ways this can be true, and that's why i love reading it this way. we change in all sorts of ways, so many of which could be antithetical to the relationship that worked so well before. maybe it can still show more work, but maybe it can't. and what does it look like as you figure that out? i think it looks kind of like this. for most of the book i thought that miri was unrealistically passive. i wanted to yell at her to just do something, anything, but really, i don't know what's more realistic than being frozen with uncertainty, want, and sadness, as you see the world you had made crumbling. as someone who freezes under pressure myself, i should have given her more leeway throughout the book. i can see just moving forward while trying to hold on to whatever you can of the past and the person you love, not knowing what to do, until you do.
"I see my mother in myself, though less in the sense of inherited features and more in the sense of an intruder poor hidden behind a curtain."
"My heart is a thing thing, these days -- shred of paper blown between the spaces in my ribs."
the only line i didn't like and that really rubbed me the wrong way: "The problem with relationships between women is that neither one of you is automatically the wronged party, which frankly takes a lot of the fun out of an argument." this felt way too pat and frankly not worthy of the rest of the book this is in. show less
A strange, unsettling, weird, sad love story about the things we’ll do and the things we’ll sacrifice for the one we love. The fantastical/science fictional elements are surreal, dreamlike. I was reminded of those nightmares where something awful is happening and there’s nothing you can do about it—you can’t find your house, you can’t remember something essential, your teeth are falling out—when in real life you’d just ask for directions or see a dentist. So the actual plot is nightmarishly nonsensical. The real strength of this book is the myriad tiny everyday details that make up a loving relationship, that make up our concept of the one we love: the small gestures cherished, fragments of conversations remembered, even show more the fights and annoyances. It’s a love story, above all. show less
I absolutely loved this weird little story, despite the writing being very dark and meandering! The author's turn of phrase is both amusing - 'Carmen typically speaks about him the way one might refer to a degree: a three-year period one has to endure in order to talk with overbearing authority on exactly one subject' - and thought provoking - 'To drop below the surface is still to sink, however intentionally – a simple matter of taking on water, just as drowning only requires you to open your mouth.' And of course, reading this in June 2023, with the loss of the 'Titanic' submersible now confirmed, there is an unintentionally poignant aspect to the text:
“What are they going to do,” she said, her impulse to pray apparently cut show more short by irritation, “send a search party ten thousand feet then throw a rope ladder the rest of the way?”
Told in alternating chapters of first person narration, marine biologist Leah recounts her descent to the depths of the ocean on a research expedition to study life in the 'Hadal Zone', while her wife Miri realises that the woman who returned to her after six months below the sea is no longer the same person, and that she might not be human at all. I loved the sci-fi element, very reminiscent of the excellent Blackwater books by Michael McDowell, but also couldn't stop thinking about the metaphysical subtext of love and loss. Miri has to face being married to a stranger, but also starts to grieve for Leah before she has to let her go. I prefer character-driven narratives, and loved learning about Miri's fractious history with her late mother and Leah's love of the sea, complete with 'did you know?' trivia. Their relationship did seem a little cutesy, full of details about favourite films and personal observations, but the rose-tinted past is balanced by the horror of the present and the pain of the future. And as Miri observes:
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.
To paraphrase Johnny Nash, I was left with more questions than answers, but was completely captivated by the story and the characters - I nearly missed my stop while reading on the way to work, and I was only a couple of chapters in! show less
“What are they going to do,” she said, her impulse to pray apparently cut show more short by irritation, “send a search party ten thousand feet then throw a rope ladder the rest of the way?”
Told in alternating chapters of first person narration, marine biologist Leah recounts her descent to the depths of the ocean on a research expedition to study life in the 'Hadal Zone', while her wife Miri realises that the woman who returned to her after six months below the sea is no longer the same person, and that she might not be human at all. I loved the sci-fi element, very reminiscent of the excellent Blackwater books by Michael McDowell, but also couldn't stop thinking about the metaphysical subtext of love and loss. Miri has to face being married to a stranger, but also starts to grieve for Leah before she has to let her go. I prefer character-driven narratives, and loved learning about Miri's fractious history with her late mother and Leah's love of the sea, complete with 'did you know?' trivia. Their relationship did seem a little cutesy, full of details about favourite films and personal observations, but the rose-tinted past is balanced by the horror of the present and the pain of the future. And as Miri observes:
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.
To paraphrase Johnny Nash, I was left with more questions than answers, but was completely captivated by the story and the characters - I nearly missed my stop while reading on the way to work, and I was only a couple of chapters in! show less
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Published Reviews
Death and the ocean beguile Julia Armfield’s debut novel Our Wives Under the Sea, a work that plumbs with striking subtlety what it feels like to live with the mystery of both. The book explores the transformations that test intimacy, ones that are perhaps even more unsettling than the sure fact of death....Blending elements of horror, gothic, and realism, Our Wives Under the Sea takes the show more bottom of the ocean as a speculative topography on which to explore the terrors of the mysterious gravitational pull we exert on each other....The ocean intrigues us for the same reasons love does: the challenge of knowing someone to their depths seduces us despite — or maybe because of — its seeming impossibility. Armfield’s work is an elliptical, leaky manual on how to live in the half-known life: the in-betweens of intimacy, the flux of not knowing, and the waves of surrealism that inundate the everyday. show less
added by Lemeritus
This is a novel in which one of the narrators says, “For a long time nothing happened,” and she means it. There is little movement here in the fetid atmosphere that drifts between convalescence and hospice.... “Panic is a misuse of oxygen,” Leah warns, but by the climax of this eerie novel, I was misusing it with abandon.
added by Lemeritus
A turn toward horror at the end will satisfyingly rachet up the tension for some readers but may discomfit others. Told in stunning language, Armfield’s heartrending story of two people forced apart by trauma is enough.
added by Lemeritus
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- Canonical title
- Our Wives Under the Sea
- Original publication date
- 2022
- People/Characters
- Miri; Leah
- Epigraph
- Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beau... (show all)ty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
—Moby-Dick
ELLEN BRODY: There's a clinical name for it, isn't there?
MARTIN BRODY: Drowning.
—Jaws - Dedication
- For Rosalie, on dry land and elsewhere
- First words
- The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.
- Quotations
- “I guess it must be weird,” she says—the sweet plum of her voice, the way her vowels seem to take up more space than the shape of her mouth allows—“living with someone again after such a long absence. I guess it mus... (show all)t be weird,” she says, “having to share your space.”
The problem with relationships between women is that neither one of you is automatically the wronged party, which frankly takes a lot of the fun out of an argument.
Rather in the way that it's very easy to kill an orchid, it often seemed little short of inevitable.
Miri said this to me once: Every horror movie ends the way you know it will. If you're watching a movie about werewolves, you can be almost certain your hero will become one by the end. If you're watching a movie about vampir... (show all)es, same thing. Ghosts, too, I think, if the hero wasn't already a ghost to begin with. I thought about this a little, at the end of things.
I'm a Catholic, I said at one point, so I believe in punishment but not reward.
Something I learned very quickly was that grieving was complicated by lack of certainty, that the hope inherent in a missing loved one was also a species of curse.
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 if the grief is frozen... (show all) by ambiguity, by the constant possibility of reversal, then so is the ability to cope. It's not grief, one woman posted, it's more like a haunting.
The afternoon was strange-colored, inconsistent, the way the sky goes dark before a thunderstorm but the grass is still lit up and you can't figure out where the light is coming from. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)I know all this, and I know that as my head cleared, finally, of everything, sunken thoughts receding with the thing that we had left below, I thought to myself Miri Miri Miri and I waited for the ocean to end.
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- Waters, Sarah; Arnett, Kristen; Johnson, Daisy; Attenberg, Jami; Welch, Florence; Mukherjee, Neel (show all 7); Lazarin, Danielle
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- 823.92
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- PR6101.R638
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