2023/081: Our Wives Under the Sea — Julia Arnfield

The problem isn’t that she went away, it’s that nothing about her going away felt normal. It isn’t that her being back is difficult, it’s that I’m not convinced she’s really back at all. [p. 53]

This was a literal beach read (I like a frisson with my sea-bathing) and a horribly timely one as it coincided with the Titan submersible incident. The premise is simple: a submersible vessel with a crew of three, on a mission to the uttermost depths of the ocean, the Hadal Zone. The submarine's power and communications cease to function during their descent, but life-support systems keep running, and the three spend an indeterminate period in the abyss. Leah, one of the crew, a marine biologist and Miri's wife, is away for six months rather than the expected three weeks, and when she comes back she has suffered a sea-change.

The novel opens after all this has happened, with Miri trying to make sense of the changes in Leah: a taste for salt water, a preference for lying in the bath all day, a silvering -- oystering -- of the skin. Miri rings the Centre daily, but although they funded the mission they never tell Miri anything about the recovery, the quarantine, or even the purpose of sending Leah, Jelka and Matteo into the abyss. There's nobody that Miri can really talk to. Her friend Carmen seems to think the problem is that Miri has to share her space again. Miri's parents are both dead, her mother after a prolonged decline into dementia, and that sense of somebody being present but simultaneously absent, of being changed, perfuses Our Wives Under the Sea. During Leah's absence, Miri joined an online group of women who pretend their husbands are on deep space missions: 'MHIS [my husband in space] was a common acronym, as was BS [before space], EB [earthbound] and CBW [came back wrong].' [p. 83] It's after this that she dreams about the Church of the Blessed Sacrament of Our Wives Under the Sea.

The novel is told in alternating chapters: Miri's unravelling as she tries to maintain a normal life while grieving Leah's absence, and Leah's (much shorter) account of her time under the sea, the smell of burning flesh, the sound of something tapping on the hull, the different ways in which her crewmates coped with the darkness and the hopelessness. I wish there'd been more of Leah: I don't mind the lack of explanation, of detail, of description, but the novel's focus is very much on Miri and her grief and anger.

Marvellous prose, an excellent exploration of mourning, and just enough body-horror to sharpen the softness of Miri's memories, of her love for someone who no longer exists.