Our Wives Under the Sea

Starred review from May 9, 2022
Armfield follows her collection, Salt Slow, with a moody and intimate debut novel, both a portrait of a marriage and a subtle horror fantasy. Miri and Leah are a married lesbian couple living in a British coastal city. Leah, a scientist with the Centre for Marine Enquiry, participates with her submarine crew in a deep-sea dive that is supposed to take three weeks but instead lasts six months, due to a malfunction, and Miri’s reactions range from helpless panic to anger to acceptance and mourning as she phones desperately to get answers from the Centre. (She even joins an online community of role-playing women who imagine their husbands are astronauts in space.) When Leah returns, she begins exhibiting such symptoms as the “silvering” of her skin, sleepwalking, loss of appetite, and a need to be near or in water. She also spends hours in the bathroom with the taps running and a sound machine playing ocean surf sounds, and bleeds frequently: from her nose, gums, and through her skin. While Miri at first looks for a logical explanation for these maladies, their source remains mysterious. Meanwhile, the two have stopped communicating and sleep in separate bedrooms, and it begins to seem as if Leah is transforming into some nonhuman creature. With echoes of Jules Verne, Thor Heyerdahl (whose work inspired Leah), H.P. Lovecraft, and the film Altered States, Armfield anchors the shudder-producing tale in authentic marine science and a deep understanding of human nature. This is mesmerizing.

May 15, 2022
Wives Miri and Leah were separated for unexpected months without communication when Leah's submarine lost power and sunk to the ocean floor in this first novel by Armfield (salt slow, 2019). Leah does return, yet she spends most of her time near running water in the bathroom. In alternating chapters, Miri narrates her attempts to navigate the bureaucratic Centre to get resources for Leah, process her mother's death, and reconnect to her wife by holding on to memories of their previous time, while Leah narrates the terrifying, unstructured, dark, and empty-windowed days under the sea. Things decline. The Centre no longer answers Miri's calls, Leah needs more tablespoons of salt stirred into her water, and the novel reaches its painful, inevitable conclusion. Readers compelled by existentialism, unanswered questions, and ambiguity will enjoy this interesting debut. Odd details, such as a chat room for wives of fictional husbands in space, percolate up like unexplained air bubbles from an ocean crevasse. This is also a book for readers compelled by oceanography, its organizing principal being the ocean's five main layers.

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June 1, 2022

DEBUT The multi-award-winning Armfield follows up her ruthlessly beautiful story collection, salt slow, with the arresting tale of two women: Leah, a marine biologist whose research trip to the depths of the Pacific left her stranded on the ocean floor for months in a disabled submarine with two other crew members, and her wife, Miri, desperate during those months and even more desperate when Leah finally returns. Leah is changed--she's obdurately distant, barely speaks, and is obsessed with running the faucets--and an increasingly frustrated Miri gives up everything to try to reach the woman she loves and seems to be losing. Unfolding in tense yet tender flashbacks, their past proves complicated--"The problem with relationships between women is that neither one of you is the wronged party"--and their present veers toward danger. What was the purpose of the trip, sponsored by a shadowy organization that has since disappeared? Its motives and the hint of conspiracy might have been explored more, but the crucial point is what happened in the effectively rendered dark far beneath the waves. VERDICT A turn toward horror at the end will satisfyingly rachet up the tension for some readers but may discomfit others. Told in stunning language, Armfield's heartrending story of two people forced apart by trauma is enough.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 15, 2022
What happens to a marriage when one spouse is no longer the person you married? Leah and Miri lead a conventional married life of comfortable routine, shared love of movies, and happiness at having found each other. Then Leah, a marine scientist, embarks on a three-week submarine expedition during which things seem to go disastrously wrong, and she and her shipmates disappear for six months at the very bottom of the ocean. Miri's narrative and excerpts from Leah's diary of the mission relate their growing awareness--and grudging management--of the changes and relationship losses they both endure as a result of their prolonged separation. When Leah returns home, things do not go as Miri had envisioned; her unanticipated transformation--a terrifying dissolution of her human form into something unfamiliar and strange--challenges Miri's assumptions about the course of their life together. Structured like the ocean's levels, deepening and darkening the further one descends, the novel slowly reveals that the horrific situation Leah tolerated may not have not been as accidental as it first seemed. The unearthly circumstances of Leah's underwater captivity and mutation are horrible enough but take on new meaning in relation to other, more understandable situations Miri has faced in her life: the metamorphosis her mother underwent during a fatal illness and the sometimes-irritating voices she hears constantly emanating from an unseen neighbor's television. Is Leah's current circumstance just further along the continuum of human understanding of loss and endurance? Launching her book with epigraphs from both Moby-Dick and Jaws, Armfield guides the reader through the liminal spaces in the couple's lives and approaches them with an occasionally ironic humor. The bleakest horror story can also be a love story; Armfield deftly illustrates how.

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