Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
Review by Eleanor Updegraff
It was always going to be a hard act to follow, salt slow. But Julia Armfield’s literary debut – one of the most brilliantly inventive, captivatingly written short-story collections of recent years – is succeeded by her first novel, Our Wives Under the Sea, a shimmering work of fiction that, while equally bold and breath-taking, displays a more refined sense of beauty. Armfield has grown as a writer, harnessing the wild power of her imagination and channelling it into a tightly structured, thematically mature novel that still seethes with creativity and pays homage to the power of good old-fashioned storytelling.
Narrated in alternating chapters voiced in the first person, Our Wives Under the Sea is the story of Miri and her wife, Leah, who has recently returned catastrophically delayed from a dangerous deep-sea research mission. A trip that was supposed to have been a routine three weeks turned into six months, and the Leah who has come back is, Miri knows, somehow not quite right. Barely communicative, she spends long hours in the bath, stirs spoonfuls of salt into glasses of tap water, and is prone to violent outbursts of screaming in the night. What begins as the chronicle of a return tinged with resentment – Miri spent most of Leah’s absence believing her to be dead – soon descends the slippery slope into surrealist horror, at the same time offering a shattering exploration of grief, marriage, loneliness, and how much of ourselves we are willing to sacrifice for the people we love.
Many of Armfield’s signature themes, which were first explored in salt slow, are probed here as well: the human body, the mysteries of the ocean, loss, romance, a sense of belonging. As in her short stories, she enmeshes the absurd with the everyday, and displays a marked fascination with the Gothic that lends the sections narrated by Leah, many of which take place on a stranded submarine, a particularly spine-chilling edge. On the surface, this book is about the slow disintegration of a relationship, about the pitiless changes wrought by external forces, about the terrible tug between holding on and letting go. Yet Armfield is a maestra of the shifting narrative, and the breakdown of Leah and Miri’s marriage is shored up time and again by sections that take us into the deeper past: their lives before, their first encounter, their falling in love. Shot through with the bittersweetness that can only come from understanding what memories are – things we can hold tightly, but will never again touch – this interwoven narrative supplies the novel’s emotional weight, making the events following Leah’s return all the harder to bear.
As saturated with grief as the novel is, it also benefits from a lighter touch in places – not only is Armfield’s prose luminous, whether in descriptions of the ocean floor or the teasing out of knotty relationships through stripped-back, effective dialogue, but a wry sense of humour creeps now and again into the narrative. The small frustrations of relationships are neatly observed, while Miri’s lopsided friendship with Carmen provides occasional moments of relief from the claustrophobic setting of her and Leah’s flat. There is, too, space for a few pointed observations on how society still treats two women who are married to each other: at a café, Miri tells a man harassing her that she has a girlfriend, worried that the word ‘wife’ would hold less weight for him; on a date in a bar, she and Leah are crudely assumed to be sisters. Liberally scattered, these may be small moments, but together they add up, each one a stone in the story’s flow.
Our Wives Under the Sea is a novel of extremes: intimate and inward-looking, focused on people locked together in small spaces, it also manages to be sweeping in its outlook, taking in themes as vast and ever-changing as the ocean itself. The balance between these two perspectives is finely honed, the blend of horror, realism and emotion mixed in just the right proportions. If it all sounds like a lot for a novel of 240 pages, it is – but, refreshingly, Armfield is the kind of writer who doesn’t let theme get in the way of story. Our Wives Under the Sea is a work of serious heart, with strongly drawn characters, compulsive pacing and an ending that is inevitable yet exquisite in its simplicity. More meditative than salt slow – which was at times a white-knuckle ride of imagination – Armfield’s move into longer fiction is confirmation of a dazzling talent and true ability to get under the skin of things, a novel that is about so much and still just about two people: deep and mesmerising and hauntingly beautiful.
Our Wives Under the Sea is published by Picador, 3rd March 2022