[REVIEW] Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
“To know the ocean, I have always felt, is to recognise the teeth it keeps half hidden.”
This book blew me away. I may have given it four stars because it kind of teetered off near the end, but I was genuinely engrossed. Julia Armfield had me hooked, line, and sinker. I look forward to how her professional writing career's going to play out with such a strong and dazzling debut. Her writing is hypnotic:
“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.”
There were so many lines that made me go, "Wow!" out loud and I meant it every time. Armfield's prose is so tender. She knows how to write not only about love, but about marriage. The book's synopsis says this story depicts marriage in a way not often seen in literature and I have to agree. It's not just because Miri and Leah are both women and that this is categorized as queer horror. You really felt the love between them, as well as the estrangement, the yearning, and the unimaginable, relentless grief of each of them having to let the other one go.
When it comes to books with dual/multiple POVs like this one, I tend to favor one narrator over the other(s), but I found myself liking Miri and Leah's sections equally. There were some times I liked the former more than the latter and vice versa, but nevertheless they were both compelling narrators with succinctly beautiful and poignant narration.
I love nautical horror/Gothic. It's my absolute favorite kind and, coupled with the "didn't come back right" trope, this book was just *chef's kiss*. Even though OWUtS never creeped me out or unsettled me the way I hoped it would, I still adore it as a novel. If you're looking for something terrifying and run-of-the-mill scary, this book builds well on dread, but the suspension is a little too dragged out with little payoff in the end, in my opinion. It's not a ghost story; it's a love story:
“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. . . . It’s easy to understand why someone might love a person but far more difficult to push yourself down into that understanding, to pull it up to your chin like bedclothes and feel it settling around you as something true.”
I appreciated how Armfield literally showed us for better or for worse with Miri and Leah, and even though we didn't really dwell too long on the good times of their relationship, you still understood and believe that they did happen. Which makes the grief all the more palpable: “I think, . . . that the thing about losing someone isn’t the loss but the absence of afterwards. D’you know what I mean? The endlessness of that.” Ah, the eye motif! The simultaneous presence and absence of love, like being at the edge of the ocean alone but not alone.
Armfield's main themes touching on grief, moving on, loss of love, and death were amazingly woven and, at times, even elegant:
“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.”
Though OWUtS has been on my to-read pile since its release in 2022, I like to think this book found me now because the grief I've been carrying in my life has never felt heavier, and Armfield helped lighten the load a little by reassuring me I'm not alone in my sadness. She's right: Most of the time none of it makes any sense, but also “[t]hings continue. This is something I have always found: unfortunately, things go on.”
It was clear from the beginning that Leah was dead, but the enormity of her absence is only amplified when she's back home again -- a semi-aquatic ghost of the person she once was -- and it really hits you how the entire book is dealing with the act of accepting a loved one's death whilst also giving yourself the time to say goodbye, to remember, and to keep loving beyond the time you had. Armfield says,
“It is easier, I guess, to believe that life is inexhaustible. Not so much that its opportunities are vast or that one’s personal dreams can be reached at any age or season, but rather to believe that every dull or daily thing you do will happen again any number of times over. To stamp a limit on even the most tedious of things — the number of times you have left to buy a coffee, the number of times you will defrost the fridge — is to acknowledge reality in a way that amounts to torture. In truth, we will only perform any action a certain number of times, and to know that can never be helpful. There is, in my opinion, no use in demanding to know the number, in demanding to know upon waking the number of boxes to be ticked off every single day. After all, why would it help to be shown the mathematics of things, when instead we could simply imagine that whatever time we have is limitless.”
That last scene with Miri carrying Leah's liquidated, almost airy body to that hidden cove and literally setting her free into the water was so hauntingly beautiful. And how the novel ends on Leah's POV just as her timeline "surfaces" and her end begins just as Miri's beginning with her ends was just so good. Mwah, mwah, mwah! I really liked this book. I wish we got a little more insight into Matteo and what happened to him, but I can also understand Armfield wanted to focus on women and how they love in this book, so it's something I can overlook.
I really do mean it when I say I'm excited to see what Armfield comes up with next. I hope she writes something similar to OWUtS but of course I believe she's talented enough to flourish in any genre. Best of luck to you!
