But the excitement with Armfield’s novel was warranted the thrill at my copy arriving in the post justified. This is not always a given with books that you have built up in your mind, anticipating their publication day with a tingle of excitement. Our Wives Under the Sea was all that I wanted it to be. Alternated with this are the Leah chapters which begin with an unexplained mechanical failure in the submarine deep under the sea’s surface and progress chronologically as the craft sinks ever deeper, as she and her crew mates try to understand what has happened to them, and try to survive. The Miri chapters are also full of memories: from the time when Leah was away and before that, of their past life together in all its stages, from early courtship to comfortable domesticity. We hear from Miri as she tries to adjust to the returned presence of this strange yet familiar wife of hers and seeks answers to what happened beneath the ocean from the mysterious ‘Centre’, the scientific institution responsible for the submarine expedition. The novel flips from chapter to chapter between two first person narratives. That the Leah who now sits beside her on the sofa, who has returned from her mission suffering from inexplicable nosebleeds and bleeding gums, a new compulsion for taking long baths and for holding her head under a running tap in the middle of the night, is not the same Leah she knew before. Our Wives Under the Sea (Picador) by Julia Armfield picks up a short while after Leah’s return to the surface, when Miri is beginning to realise that the reunion she had so longed for is not the one she had imagined – when she is beginning to realise that the established parameters of their relationship have been changed, perhaps even warped beyond recognition. This novel takes that experience, one that many will be familiar with, and explores it to its furthest extreme).
When he was away I’d yearn for his return, and yet whenever he did, for the first few days he was always altered, somehow, by the distance or the jet lag, and not quite the person I had been expecting, a stranger to me even when I knew it was him. (I had a boyfriend who used to travel to Japan for long periods with work. Except of course when people return from places, they are often not the same person they were before. Leah was missing, until she wasn’t, until she was back on dry land, back to Miri and their shared flat, their shared life.
Her wife Miri had begun to grapple with the space left by her absence, the way the absence of a lost loved one can be almost as much of a physical entity as their presence previously had been. Leah had been missing, deep beneath the sea, on a submarine mission gone wrong. In her captivating novel, Our Wives Under the Sea, Julia Armfield tenderly and credibly depicts the pain of absence, loss and transformation often experienced in romantic relationships.
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