If you put Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Peter Benchley’s Jaws, and Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” in a blender, the result would be something like Julia Armfield’s weird Our Wives Under the Sea.
The story is told in alternating chapters: Leah (a woman obsessed with the sea), tells her story in the form of a journal she kept on a disastrous deep-sea dive that stranded her and two others in undersea darkness; and that of her wife, Miri, who presumed her lost, after Leah’s return.
The tale travels, with Leah and the doomed submarine, down through the terrifying six months and the ocean’s vertical zones (sunlight, twilight, midnight, abyssal, hadal), while on land Miri tracks how their relationship is changing in the present.
As someone who is slightly claustrophobic, the prospect of being trapped on the bottom of the ocean in a tiny submarine freaks me out!
A six month hiatus with the prospect of death mixed in would not, even under the best circumstances, be easy for Leah and Miri to resume where they left off in their marriage. But Leah has also changed in fundamental and creepy ways–not surprising given the terrifying experience she had at the bottom of the sea–and Miri is forced into a reevaluation of their relationship.
If you’re in the mood for a quirky story of a eerie encounter that deals with the strange happenings under the sea and even stranger ones on land, you might want to give Our Wives Under the Sea a try. GRADE: B