The deep sea is a haunted house, a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness
Psychologically dense, surreal, and quietly haunting, Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield is a mesmerising experimental novel that explores grief at its most isolating and uncertain. Rather than adhering to the realist canon of psychological fiction, Armfield employs literary surrealism and gothic imagery—at times leaning towards the absurd—to convey the destabilising reality of grief, a state in which the boundaries between the real and imagined become increasingly blurred.
The narrative centres on Miri, whose wife Leah has returned from a submarine expedition undertaken for the mysterious institution known as “The Centre.” Originally planned to last three weeks, the mission extends inexplicably to six months, and when Leah finally returns, she is irrecoverably altered. At times, it is unclear whether Leah has truly returned at all, or whether she has transfigured into something obscure, perhaps even something of the sea. Regardless of the literal truth, Miri is forced to adapt to a reality in which the woman she loves is no longer recognisable. Armfield’s surrealist imagery becomes a physicalised metaphor for a kind of anticipatory grief — a liminal psychological space in which physical death has not materialised, yet loss is already deeply felt.
One of the most captivating features is Armfield’s sustained ocean motif, which becomes distinctly metaphorical. Shifting to Leah’s perspective, Armfield details her descent into the depths of the ocean in the Hadal Zone, where light is void, creating an atmosphere of impending doom and inevitability. This descent mirrors the emotional experience of grief itself, one where there is an overwhelming sense of powerlessness in the face of an approaching, inescapable loss. Just as waves crash onto the shore, the most unique feature of Armfield’s debut is the unexpected sense of catharsis that is achieved at the end of the novel, in which one feels submerged in Miri’s grief with a chilling intensity, emerging unsettled yet strangely cleansed.
Thus, to read Our Wives Under the Sea is to experience how art can push the boundaries of the psychological, provoking any unassuming reader to perceive grief with an entirely new perspective.
Photo by Oliver Sjöström on Unsplash