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‘Our Wives Under The Sea’ Plumbs the Depths of a Haunted Marriage
Love, death, and bad neighbors in Julia Armfield’s profoundly upsetting undersea gothic romance
“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” — H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulu
Our Wives Under The Sea is a novel defined by absence. While one main character deals with the absence of her partner, the other deals with the absence of light, god, and eventually anything at all that can be defined in terms of human comprehension. I won’t spoil any specifics, but this is the kind of book that only takes a few sentences before you can tell it’s gonna be a downer.
The story progresses across a jumbled timeline in which each section is defined by a descent deeper into an abyss. As things get progressively more unnerving, one of the few sources of comedic relief is a set of particularly obnoxious upstairs neighbors whose tv is always running, despite these neighbors always appearing to be entirely absent. But what makes Julia Armfield’s debut novel about a dissolving relationship so particularly arresting is the way she is able to effectively weaponize the lack of concrete answers as a powerful tool of building suspense.
