OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA

What happens to a marriage when one spouse is no longer the person you married?

Leah and Miri lead a conventional married life of comfortable routine, shared love of movies, and happiness at having found each other. Then Leah, a marine scientist, embarks on a three-week submarine expedition during which things seem to go disastrously wrong, and she and her shipmates disappear for six months at the very bottom of the ocean. Miri’s narrative and excerpts from Leah’s diary of the mission relate their growing awareness—and grudging management—of the changes and relationship losses they both endure as a result of their prolonged separation. When Leah returns home, things do not go as Miri had envisioned; her unanticipated transformation—a terrifying dissolution of her human form into something unfamiliar and strange—challenges Miri’s assumptions about the course of their life together. Structured like the ocean’s levels, deepening and darkening the further one descends, the novel slowly reveals that the horrific situation Leah tolerated may not have not been as accidental as it first seemed. The unearthly circumstances of Leah’s underwater captivity and mutation are horrible enough but take on new meaning in relation to other, more understandable situations Miri has faced in her life: the metamorphosis her mother underwent during a fatal illness and the sometimes-irritating voices she hears constantly emanating from an unseen neighbor’s television. Is Leah's current circumstance just further along the continuum of human understanding of loss and endurance? Launching her book with epigraphs from both Moby-Dick and Jaws, Armfield guides the reader through the liminal spaces in the couple’s lives and approaches them with an occasionally ironic humor.

The bleakest horror story can also be a love story; Armfield deftly illustrates how.