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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