I Read Julia Armfield’s ‘Our Wives Under the Sea’.
For the past five years or so, I’ve taken Decembers off of reading and focused a lot on writing about my favorite records of the year, using my free time (my reading time) and diving deep into records and taking notes and trying to come up with some helpful commentary for why I loved the music I loved over the year that’s passed. While it does yield some awesome results for something I’m deeply passionate about, it does make me miss one of my other passions. And with all of that time in between, it makes the first read of January that much better.
This gap isn’t what made Our Wives Under the Sea extraordinary, though. This book was a beautiful piece about loss, about grief, about love, and about time. I simply could not put this book down and blasted through it in two sittings. It’s a short read, only about 220 pages, but each turn of the page has something that eats at your heart, that questions how we speak to one another, that asks us to interrogate the way that we spend our time together.
There are science fiction elements to this one, times where it questions the species genetic makeup, the way that we’re built, the things we have left, the things we’re able to shed. In this book, we grapple with the mysteries of the deepest parts of our ocean and how it’s as inseparable from we as people as it is from the planet on which we live. We feel time creep by in segments measured in television programs, in glasses of saltwater, in cups of coffee, in time spent dormant as we wait on hold. We also watch time stand completely still as submariners abide claustrophobic loss of power in their submersible and wait for their controls to come back, for communication to come back, for any semblance of life on the surface to acknowledge them. As I’m reflecting now, time plays a massive role in this book, not only as an object but also as an important setting. Witnessing time stretch and contract is such a massive compass in this story, and during times when it is absent, it seems to be the thing that we miss the most.
In the end, this book is about how we process grief, and knowing how and when to let go. It’s about the ways that we shape our grief and how it deconstructs us and how we stand it up on its legs again and again and allow it to need us as much as we want to abandon it. It’s about the way it clings to us like wet towels and salt from the ocean.
But within all of that, bracketed, flashed back, and remembered in high definition, it is about new love and the way it ages with us. It’s about the way we watch the ones we love explore their life and how we watch them from the eaves of doorframes, and how important it is to be able to sketch those deep into our minds so that we can slam our eyes shut and conjure their ghosts (even if ghosts can’t speak back). It’s about the temporal nature of our togetherness.
About time, about grief, about love, the language that Armfield uses stunned me again and again, giving me massive heaves of astonishment. She rains solemnity in low precipatory patterns, setting a scene of harrowing and gloaming anger, darkness, moodiness and then swings heavily a pendulum of gravity capsizing gloom. This is sorrow coming in phases and she paints them well, especially in a way that feels like we are just about to claw out of it, or in ways that we feel like if only one thing could work out we’d find the light. I don’t think we ever find the light, but we understand the voices, and we learn to shape the dark.
I love this book and highly recommend it!! Can’t wait to dig more into this author’s other work and will always use this as a book to pass on to others.
