Death and the ocean beguile Julia Armfield’s debut novel Our Wives Under the Sea, a work that plumbs with striking subtlety what it feels like to live with the mystery of both. The book explores the transformations that test intimacy, ones that are perhaps even more unsettling than the sure fact of death....Blending elements of horror, gothic, and realism, Our Wives Under the Sea takes the bottom of the ocean as a speculative topography on which to explore the terrors of the mysterious gravitational pull we exert on each other....The ocean intrigues us for the same reasons love does: the challenge of knowing someone to their depths seduces us despite — or maybe because of — its seeming impossibility. Armfield’s work is an elliptical, leaky manual on how to live in the half-known life: the in-betweens of intimacy, the flux of not knowing, and the waves of surrealism that inundate the everyday.

This is a novel in which one of the narrators says, “For a long time nothing happened,” and she means it. There is little movement here in the fetid atmosphere that drifts between convalescence and hospice.... “Panic is a misuse of oxygen,” Leah warns, but by the climax of this eerie novel, I was misusing it with abandon.

A turn toward horror at the end will satisfyingly rachet up the tension for some readers but may discomfit others. Told in stunning language, Armfield’s heartrending story of two people forced apart by trauma is enough.

Gothic elements are knitted throughout (“The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness” goes the tantalising first sentence). Everything that happens on the surface has symbolic, metaphorical meaning beneath. Take Leah’s observation that “things can thrive in unimaginable conditions. All they need is the right sort of skin.” This appears to refer to sea creatures, but the word choice allows for a much wider meaning.... This mode of expression is ubiquitous throughout. The prose is reaching for something, but what? This might be a book about the sea, about depression, illness, grief....We collect information, but there is also the understanding that we can never “know enough to escape from the panic of not knowing”....Indeed, though the writing is relentlessly exacting, Our Wives Under the Sea tends towards the unknowable, which might also be synonymous with death or the uncanny. There is an almost spiritual endlessness to its quest. Like all good novels, it goes deep and then deeper again.