Our Wives Under the Sea – Julia Armfield
Expectation: A supernatural horror story focused on a lesbian couple navigating the devastating aftermath of an extended trip under the sea.
Reality: Slowly plotted and more literary than mindless, this is for people who like their horror light and their emotions heavy.
My Take:
In “Our Wives Under the Sea,” Julia Armfield combines the prose of Sarah Winman with the sci-fi sensibilities of Blake Crouch to deliver a distressing queer love story primarily focused on the aftermath of deep sea scientific exploration gone wrong.
In many ways this book is more interesting today than at its publication in early 2022, given the world’s fixation with the Titan submersible. There’s an uncanny similarity to the plot of the novel as to what happened to the doomed vessel.
Except the crew of the submersible in “Wives,” which includes Leah and two others, make it back home after six months of lost contact. Miri is struggling with the changes in her wife and overall lack of compassion and support from the employer that sent her away.
We hear the points of view of each woman — Miri, navigating the current state of the relationship and reminiscing of the past, and Leah, through letters written while below the surface. It’s two crucial pieces of a slowly unfolding mystery, but they never quite clicked into place.
Even as a literary fiction fan, I was a bit let down with this one. While Armfield delivered well-developed characters and some good understated horror elements, the plotting was needlessly slow and drawn out.
Isolation and abandonment are two recurring themes, and the queer lens the author put on the story made it feel more heartbreaking to me. I appreciated the fidelity they showed to one another even as their lives slowly unravel. If I hadn’t been so invested in the characters’ relationship, I would've given up.
Everything else — the ancillary characters, the digressions and tiny moments of a life lived together — never quite felt organically matched. It’s almost like Armfield was writing two very different stories and somehow mixed up the pages into this genre-defying jumble that mostly worked.
[spoilers below - stop reading if you haven’t read the story]
I was also incredibly let down by the ending. While it pulled at my heartstrings, especially when it became clear there was going to be no happy ending for two people that truly loved one another, I was not expecting Leah to turn into a jellyfish. At least I think she turned into a jellyfish. She may have just melted into the sea.
Also, there was so much more Armfield could’ve mined from Leah’s experiences on the submersible. The burning meat smell. The voices and hysteria of her fellow crew members. The nefarious company. The eye monster. The eye button on the ship Leah noticed later. All compelling ideas that, if explored in more detail, would’ve made this a far more interesting read.
[spoilers ended]
Listen, Armfield’s a gifted writer, but I think categorizing this as horror is being incredibly generous. But I also feel that without the horror elements there is nothing truly unique about this story, outside of the core relationship.
The audiobook narrated by Annabel Baldwin (Miri) and Robyn Holdaway (Leah) was a solid effort. My one complaint is that even with all the strangeness going on around them neither performer ever lost the cool-as-a-cucumber British accent. There were at least a few situations where some hysteria was called for.
Rating (story): 3.5/5 stars
Rating (narration): 4/5 stars
Format: Audiobook (library loan)
Dates read: August 25 – August 27, 2023
Multi-tasking: Good to go. It is more character-driven than plot-driven, so if you are distracted you may miss the subtle moments. Honestly, this is somewhat of a slog at times so keeping occupied is recommended.
