First Impressions Review: Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield
The deep sea is a
haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move
about in the darkness. ‘Unstill’ is the word Leah uses…”
This book combines the tragic melancholy of a gothic novel with Lovecraftian sea-critter-and-body-horror creepiness in a very creative way. It follows two timelines. The first is narrated by Miri, whose wife Leah has come back from an unexpectedly extended deep sea voyage…different. It is mostly the present timeline, though we do get insight into Miri’s memories of who Leah used to be. And there is a past timeline, in which we see that voyage from Leah’s perspective. We never entirely, exactly, understand what happened to Leah, but that only adds to the horror vibes, really. Throughout the book I found myself thinking of this quote from ‘The Tempest’:
“Full fathoms five thy father lies/ Of his bones are coral made
Those are pearls that were his eyes/ Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change/ Into something rich and strange”
Some readers may be a bit frustrated with Miri’s apparent passivity to the changes occurring in her wife. But if you have ever watched a loved one suffer a debilitating mental or physical deterioration which you don’t know how to help with, and they won’t get outside help, then you will probably very much relate to lines like these:
“‘You don’t have to worry’, she would say, and then go on bleeding, and the obviousness of the problem combined with the refusal of help left me at first frustrated and subsequently rather resentful.”
And Miri has been through something like this before, with her rather difficult mother who died of what I believe is Huntington’s disease – quite a traumatic experience, especially since she fears she might have inherited the condition. So feeling paralyzed and stuck is rather an understandable reaction! She is at least trying desperately to get in touch with the Centre, the organization that sent Leah on this mission to get some kind of help or explanation…but they are as slippery as eels.
And the things she says about their prior relationship, despite the warning “loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes” – gah, my heart! I mean, listen to this:
“The thing about Leah was that nine times out of ten she couldn’t bring herself to be unkind about anyone, but then three times a year she would say something so blisteringly cruel about someone we knew that she’d clap both hands to her mouth and turn in a circle as if warding off evil…she read a book in which a pair of lesbians emailed each other meaningful lines of poetry and shortly afterward asked if this was the sort of thing we should be doing, too. ‘If you ever send me poetry’, I texted her, ‘I’ll cut your tits off’, and over the course of the next week and a half she emailed me every poem from ‘The Complete Works of Wilfred Owen’, signing off every email with a winking face and a heart.”
Come on - that’s some of the cutest shit I’ve ever read! And that isn’t even mentioning Leah’s teenage friendship with Pamela the octopus…
The claustrophobia and growing mental instability of the scientific team after they find that they are not in control of their submarine is very well written. Uggh, even just the idea of the mysterious smell of cooked meat wafting around in a space where it shouldn’t be…eww. But there is more to Leah’s condition when Miri gets her wife back (but doesn’t get her wife back) than that! I won’t say too much more, as the slow unfolding of the story is a great part of its charm. Hmm, is “charm” the right word? I think it is for me. I felt very seen by this story and found it not scary but more “cathartic in a bittersweet way”.
I suspect I will read it again, both for that and the brilliant bits of foreshadowing – which made me bump it up a star when I realized! A few to pay attention to: Leah’s dream of being a kind of mermaid. Her obsession with the saint who consumed only fruit and saltwater. Speaking of which – it never says in the book, but (and it is kinda weird that I know this) Saint Brendan is the patron saint of whales as well as mariners because he supposedly landed on an island that turned out to be a giant sea beast…
This book combines the tragic melancholy of a gothic novel with Lovecraftian sea-critter-and-body-horror creepiness in a very creative way. It follows two timelines. The first is narrated by Miri, whose wife Leah has come back from an unexpectedly extended deep sea voyage…different. It is mostly the present timeline, though we do get insight into Miri’s memories of who Leah used to be. And there is a past timeline, in which we see that voyage from Leah’s perspective. We never entirely, exactly, understand what happened to Leah, but that only adds to the horror vibes, really. Throughout the book I found myself thinking of this quote from ‘The Tempest’:
“Full fathoms five thy father lies/ Of his bones are coral made
Those are pearls that were his eyes/ Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change/ Into something rich and strange”
Some readers may be a bit frustrated with Miri’s apparent passivity to the changes occurring in her wife. But if you have ever watched a loved one suffer a debilitating mental or physical deterioration which you don’t know how to help with, and they won’t get outside help, then you will probably very much relate to lines like these:
“‘You don’t have to worry’, she would say, and then go on bleeding, and the obviousness of the problem combined with the refusal of help left me at first frustrated and subsequently rather resentful.”
And Miri has been through something like this before, with her rather difficult mother who died of what I believe is Huntington’s disease – quite a traumatic experience, especially since she fears she might have inherited the condition. So feeling paralyzed and stuck is rather an understandable reaction! She is at least trying desperately to get in touch with the Centre, the organization that sent Leah on this mission to get some kind of help or explanation…but they are as slippery as eels.
And the things she says about their prior relationship, despite the warning “loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes” – gah, my heart! I mean, listen to this:
“The thing about Leah was that nine times out of ten she couldn’t bring herself to be unkind about anyone, but then three times a year she would say something so blisteringly cruel about someone we knew that she’d clap both hands to her mouth and turn in a circle as if warding off evil…she read a book in which a pair of lesbians emailed each other meaningful lines of poetry and shortly afterward asked if this was the sort of thing we should be doing, too. ‘If you ever send me poetry’, I texted her, ‘I’ll cut your tits off’, and over the course of the next week and a half she emailed me every poem from ‘The Complete Works of Wilfred Owen’, signing off every email with a winking face and a heart.”
Come on - that’s some of the cutest shit I’ve ever read! And that isn’t even mentioning Leah’s teenage friendship with Pamela the octopus…
The claustrophobia and growing mental instability of the scientific team after they find that they are not in control of their submarine is very well written. Uggh, even just the idea of the mysterious smell of cooked meat wafting around in a space where it shouldn’t be…eww. But there is more to Leah’s condition when Miri gets her wife back (but doesn’t get her wife back) than that! I won’t say too much more, as the slow unfolding of the story is a great part of its charm. Hmm, is “charm” the right word? I think it is for me. I felt very seen by this story and found it not scary but more “cathartic in a bittersweet way”.
I suspect I will read it again, both for that and the brilliant bits of foreshadowing – which made me bump it up a star when I realized! A few to pay attention to: Leah’s dream of being a kind of mermaid. Her obsession with the saint who consumed only fruit and saltwater. Speaking of which – it never says in the book, but (and it is kinda weird that I know this) Saint Brendan is the patron saint of whales as well as mariners because he supposedly landed on an island that turned out to be a giant sea beast…
