The novel Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield is beautiful, thoughtful, original, packed with ideas that generate discussion. And yet I found it a bit too ponderous to love it.

Miri’s wife Leah has “come back different” after a deep sea research mission that overran by months. Leah seems weakened and barely eats, sleeps or speaks. She sips on salt water and soaks for long hours in the bath. Her skin takes on a strange hue, almost translucent.

Miri spends her days worrying and trying to get hold of the research centre behind the mission to find out what happened but they are proving maddeningly elusive. She reflects on earlier days of her and Leah’s relationship and who Leah truly is, or was.

Chapters alternate between Miri’s present and Leah’s journal of the mission itself. They are a tiny crew of just three and disaster strikes early, but in an odd way that is left open to the reader’s interpretation. The craft’s communications, lights and engines fail so that it sinks to the ocean floor and cannot be manoeuvred or any message sent. But somehow it still has a working shower, oxygen and water recycling plus a store of long-life food that could last them months, despite the original mission only being a couple of weeks long.

“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, tilting her head to the side as if in answer to some sound, though the evening is quiet – dry hum of the road outside the window and little to draw the ear besides.”

Did their employer know this might happen? Worse still, was this a deliberate act? That seems like the logical answer – especially considering the avoidance tactics Miti is experiencing. But Armfield also offers a supernatural possibility. In the ocean depths, Leah and her crewmates experience things that have no simple explanation. Is it the stress of the situation or is there really some kind of…presence?

Which sounds exciting, with potential to be a thriller akin to All the White Spaces by Ally Wilkes or Dark Matter by Michelle Paver. But Our Wives Under the Seadoes not have the pace or tone of a thriller. It is slow and contemplative, an examination of a romance that was solid and steady but is no longer. Miri is now her wife’s carer, with signs of love between them getting fewer with each week that passes.

I can see that one reading of this novel is that it’s an allegory of losing a loved one to Alzheimer’s or another degenerative disease. But Armfield keeps enough fantastical elements in play that the novel can be taken as a fantasy novel written in literary style.

Published 2022 by Picador.

Source: Bought from Bookhaus in Bristol.