Exceedingly moody ... Often achingly poetic ... But Armfield exercises an exquisite — even sadistic — sense of suspense. She’s cleverly designed this story so that we only gradually become aware of how little we know ... 'Panic is a misuse of oxygen,' Leah warns, but by the climax of this eerie novel, I was misusing it with abandon.
I have not stopped dreaming of Our Wives Under the Sea since I finished it ... Julie Armfield’s debut novel is sharp, atmospheric, dryly funny, sad, distinctive. If it doesn’t appear on numerous prize lists, I’ll eat my hat ... There are ecological undertones – one thinks of rising tides, though the climate crisis is not explicitly mentioned ... Indeed, though the writing is relentlessly exacting, Our Wives Under the Sea tends towards the unknowable, which might also be synonymous with death or the uncanny. There is an almost spiritual endlessness to its quest. Like all good novels, it goes deep and then deeper again.
Part bruisingly tender love story, part nerve-clanging submarine thriller ... Armfield drips the supernatural into the quotidian ... The weirdness is kept in check by the humane warmth of Leah and Miri’s relationship ... There is such tenderness in the precision of these observations of long-term love and such eerie estrangement when the uncanny intrudes. Eventually, the two moods fuse at the novel’s heart-slicing, cinematic climax. I’ll be thinking about it for ages — and checking the bathtub for grit.
Julia Armfield’s haunting debut novel deftly weaves a love story into creeping horror. Alternating between Leah’s account of the fateful expedition and Miri’s of its aftermath, Armfield sets two timelines hurtling towards each other as the text approaches its central question: what happened down there? ... For all its magic realism, Armfield’s debut sticks closer to what life is made of than most, mapping the grim monotony of existence, the undignified and the humdrum, as much as it does the mythical side of Leah’s story ... Exhausting and exhilarating by turns, Our Wives Under the Sea is a quiet triumph, but beware – this unsettling, saltwater-soaked story seeps deeper than you think.
... may be characterized as an incisive exploration of human relationships and loss, as a narrative both funny and darkly claustrophobic, as a truncated same-sex romance, an engaging mystery, and a startling exercise in gothic horror. Overarching these genres is an articulation of the concept of sinking, both in the sea and in life. This novel is both an expertly crafted work of fiction and a transformation fable, a modernist one without a moral ... This novel is much more than high-concept fiction. While anchored by this simple but suspenseful throughline, Armfield expertly takes us on many time-looping, backstory journeys: the history of Miri and Leah and their relationship, their quarrels, their mothers, and their interactions with friends, all of which effectively illuminate these characters ... a tour de force, especially impressive as it is a debut novel, although her book of stories, 2020’s salt slow, has already won her acclaim. Armfield seamlessly weaves dual narratives and blends multiple genres and looping narrative time into a coherent, beautifully written, and often funny whole. In an era of dampening spirits, this novel is an example of escapism, yes, but escapism with a substance that’s well worth sinking your own teeth into.
... an arresting novel that moves quietly ... Armfield seamlessly treads the genres of speculative fiction, heartrending romance, and deep-sea, ecological thriller. With an absorbing and pleasurable lyrical style, she allows haunting suggestions to percolate under the surface of tender moments that otherwise navigate grief, love, and letting go ... It is in this space of creeping horror, of suspense, of bodily peculiarity, where Armfield especially excels. This novel is exquisitely grotesque, surreal, and elegiac in equal measure.
When writing in the voice of Miri, author Armfield is at her best, and her insights into the grieving process sometimes stop you in your tracks ... Miri’s lack of connection with others is echoed in Leah’s narrative, which, although more straightforward than Miri’s, is also not as compelling. Leah’s story is less insightful and rather thinly stretched. While she describes the trauma of being trapped aboard a malfunctioning submarine, she doesn’t come across as traumatized, nor does her experience foreshadow the damage Miri observes upon her return. In fact, it’s altogether unclear, given Leah’s character as we come to know it, why or to whom she is directing her narrative ... Nevertheless, the prose throughout the novel is frequently moving and evocative, and it kept me turning the pages. Armfield has a deep feel for language, although she sometimes makes use of it to obscure a lack of psychological depth. She also indulges in occasional falsely lyrical passages ... Quibbles aside, the final scene in Miri’s narrative absolutely floored me. As a description of loss and letting a loved one go, it moves me to tears just thinking about it now. So, if you stick with Our Wives Under the Sea through some of its labored and rambling passages, you will have earned this denouement. Getting to the author’s closing insight is well worth the wait.
There are tropes, here, of pure horror: overt references to Jaws, voices heard by some and not others, terrible smells, a mysterious research centre. They keep the novel moving, but Armfield’s quarry feels larger: this is a kind of Orpheus story about transformation and return ... There are clever lines, everywhere, and wry, funny ones ... Perhaps because of their reliance on logic and myth, her short stories manage, in a weird way, to be both original and predictable. And what works in an intense few pages does not necessarily work at length: Our Wives Under the Sea feels stretched slightly too thinly over the body of an idea.
[Armfield's] sentences are immaculate. But it’s easier to do that in the confines of a short story, harder to pull off sentence-level magic on every page of a novel where there’s more plotting and work to be done. And yet, Armfield has written a novel so chock-full of stunning sentences that that urge to scream needled its way into me throughout my first and second reads of the book. The language in Our Wives Under The Sea is like a fork’s tines moving through perfectly cooked fish: grotesque and lovely all at once, flesh and skin pulled from bone ... For a book so steeped in themes of loss, of grief, of being haunted from within, it’s also full of tenderness and care, too. It’s the best execution of horror-romance I’ve ever seen ... It feels important to note after that particular list that the book is also very sexy ... There’s incredible restraint to the horrors Armfield renders ... Here is a simultaneously bleak and beautiful elegiac novel. It wraps its tentacles around you and squeezes harder and harder until you feel as if you might burst, like grief itself. On my second read, I sobbed at the ending though I knew it was coming and thought of all the people and things I miss.
Death and the ocean beguile Julia Armfield’s debut novel Our Wives Under the Sea, a work that plumbs with striking subtlety what it feels like to live with the mystery of both ... Centered around Leah’s attempt to settle back at home, the story masterfully captures a different kind of intimate grief: the feeling of separateness that continues between the two women even after Leah resurfaces. After an experience of transformation, Armfield suggests, reunion can feel as much like a loss as it does a regaining. Blending elements of horror, gothic, and realism, Our Wives Under the Sea takes the bottom of the ocean as a speculative topography on which to explore the terrors of the mysterious gravitational pull we exert on each other ... Armfield charges at the question of what it feels like to live on the edges of knowledge, infusing moments of horror and surrealism into the everyday ... The experience of reading Armfield’s novel feels like a descent into deep water, a study in adapting to conditions of intensifying darkness and pressure ... the novel’s glacial pace only worked, in my opinion, to attune readers even more subtly to the subtext beyond every laconic observation, the way that — in troubled intimacy especially — any calm surface might belie tumult churning just beyond what can be named ... Armfield’s work is an elliptical, leaky manual on how to live in the half-known life: the in-betweens of intimacy, the flux of not knowing, and the waves of surrealism that inundate the everyday.
... a haunting and masterfully crafted novel of love, loss, lesbians, and sea monsters ... Our Wives Under the Sea’s heartbreaking and inevitable conclusion offers no such alien solution to our very human harms, but it carries the reader through the horror of loving other people nonetheless.
Ruthlessly beautiful ... 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.
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.
The little details that Julia Armfield builds into her debut novel are strange but incredibly compelling ... a beautiful tale about a lovely marriage that has fallen under the spell of powerful natural forces. It encapsulates the vulnerability of love and union, and how the world is constantly throwing us curveballs. Armfield’s straight-ahead narrative style is an awesome twist with the strange mythic forces that she avails to her protagonists. This fantastic debut is a totally captivating thrill ride and a love story that offers a real romance.
Moody and intimate ... Armfield anchors the shudder-producing tale in authentic marine science and a deep understanding of human nature. This is mesmerizing.
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 ... 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.
Above all else, this debut is a feat of imagery and lyrical syntax. Language ebbs and flows, both watery and full of depth, almost tidal in its movements. Armfield conjures the otherworldly and unknowable quality of the dark depths of the ocean with skill, inspiring in readers a curiosity for marine worlds they probably didn’t know they had. She blends genres: horror, romance, science fiction, travel narrative, in a unique and daring way ... At times, it feels as if Our Wives Under the Sea might have worked better as a short story, as it lacks a narratorial arc that felt as deep as the language and imagery. Nonetheless, this uncanny sea voyage is a bold work that deserves praise.
