Our Wives Under the Sea (2022)

oceanic cosmichorror, existential dread, grief and learning to let go

In an attempt to transform my writing from task to art, I want to explore a novel I am currently reading.

Inspired by

Elle

and her essays segment, particularly her post on The Virgin Suicides. Thank you for being an inspiration in the writing community.

I also want to shout out photographer Noriko Yabu and her 'Suisou’ photoshoot. I have included some of my favourites of this shoot to pair with this novel. You can find the Suisou collection here.

!! Contains spoilers !!

Noriko Yabu ‘Suisou’, 23.

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I bought this book not long after it was published and it has sat in on a shelf or in a box until I moved into my current flat. Though lost now, the receipt I found inside when I opened it this September was printed in 2022 at my university-city Waterstones. The ink was black and smudged and the paper felt plastic to touch. It’s now lost on the damp floor of some bus that is doomed to never know life outside of the student-to-city-centre bus route.

When Julia Armfield comes up in conversation, anyone who displays some sort of curiosity into her work is immediately encouraged to follow it.

“I’m thinking about reading Julia Armfield. I’ve had my eye on her stuff for a while now, should I—”

“Do it. Her writing is beautiful and haunting. Our Wives under the Sea is amazing and I’m looking to reading Private Rites soon. Going to do a reread of Salt Slow at some point too.”

Average conversation about Julia Armfield.

On the first day reading this novel, I was sat in the staff room and I was told to “prepare myself” for what was to come. Like any other self-proclaimed ‘thought daughter’, I was intrigued and masochistically dived into the prose. You said I should prepare myself, huh? All I am hearing is that something in these two hundred and forty pages is going to make me feel something so monumental there is a possibility emotions will transcend into the visceral. I’m all yours.

Our Wives Under the Sea is more than just a novel. It’s an experience. Told from two narrators and multiple points of view, Our Wives Under the Sea encapsulates what it is to yearn and grieve whilst the person (thing? muse?) is still present, still seemingly within reach. The novel follows Miri and Leah during and after Leah’s deep sea exploration, which went horribly wrong. As the novel opens, we wonder if that something followed Leah back onto land.

Knowing the past and present and the narrative being the events leading up to the present is a harrowing trope. It carves my heart out, stamps on it and replaces it with heavy dread. The slowburn horror is all-consuming and it makes the novel wriggle and squirm alive. In a way, it reminds me of Giovanni’s Room, a novella I read recently in which the narrator shares how his relationship with Giovanni ends in the introduction. Slowburn horror with existential dread always hit me harder when the main relationship pairing are queer. I suppose we can thank the endless bashing of the ‘bury your gays’ trope for that.

The flow between Miri and Leah, their past and present and future is seamless. Sometimes I’m reading a chapter and I forget who is speaking—and not in a ‘they don’t have distinct voices’ way. This is purely my own doing. I am so focused swimming in the prose that I forget to come up for breath at each chapter beginning. Ironic, really — especially if you’ve read this too. After her return, Miri struggles to determine where the sea ends and her wife begins.

Noriko Yabu ‘Suisou’, 12.

Through Miri, we also are privy to their intimacy, or lack of it in their relationship. After returning, Leah spends hours upon hours in the bath tub

“Leah has moved from the corner of the living room and is locked in the bathroom, running both the taps. This isn’t entirely unusual. Quite often these days I will wake at odd hours and hear the bathtub being filled.”

“More than once, I have come in to find Leah sitting on the edge of the bathtub.”

There is something so off-putting that makes me on edge. I imagine me sitting in the bath for most of the day, water long cold and exposed and it makes me shiver. Thank you to whoever invented showers and water systems because I get bored sitting in one spot, never able to fully extend any limb and skin pruned. These everyday, common horrors build slow tension as part of a chain reaction. Problems of bureaucracy also adds layers to this: the company, known as “The Centre” of which Leah is employed by, is seemingly impossible to get in touch with. Miri is left with vague to little to answers from the evasive worker on the other side of the phone. Worst of all, Miri is still alone, her wife still in the lightless underbelly of the sea.

If you think Our Wives Under the Sea is a literary-horror novel with mermaids, sirens and selkies, you are wrong. It has none of that. If you think that all of this tension will eventually break either through some sci-fi gore or Leah somehow making a miraculous recovery, you would also be wrong. Like me. I knew it would be a metaphor for her trauma and their Miri’s and Leah’s relationship, but sometimes it was a bit too on the nose. If Armfield would have played with the speculative, the tension would feel like it had a purpose, rather than a haunting Miri of who Leah used to be.

With that being said, the ending it fitting. The tension floats away just as Leah does at the end. Miri finally learning to let go and realising that she has barely been a human for the duration of the novel. It’s bittersweet, really, but despite the horrors persisting, there is hope. Leah is free and Miri learns to heal and starts to pick up the pieces of her life.

4/5 stars

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Thanks for reading!

Love from,

Hannah

(ig, spotify, goodreads, letterboxd)