Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

Published 2022 · 60,010 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Horror, LGBTQ+ Fiction

How hard is Our Wives Under the Sea to read?

Our Wives Under the Sea scores 67 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
Armfield writes in polished contemporary literary English with a recurring seam of specialist marine biology vocabulary — ballast tanks, CO2 scrubbers, saturation dives, biofluorescence, bioluminescence, cetology. Medical and anatomical terms appear in Miri's chapters (zygomatic major, orbicularis oculi, Duchenne smile). The vocabulary is elevated and precise without becoming obscure, sitting between The Great Gatsby (45) and Lolita (65) in demand.
Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
Miri's chapters run to long, clause-dense interior monologue, accumulating observations through em-dashes, parentheses, and run-on catalogues (the list of her mother's attributes covering an entire page). Leah's chapters favour a cooler, more declarative register that reads as lecture notes from the deep. Neither approaches Faulknerian or Jamesian extremity, but sustained attention is required — closer to 2666 (70) than to 1984 (35).
Abstraction: 62 out of 100
The novel thinks through grief, loss, transformation, and queer love by embedding those ideas in precise domestic and marine images rather than stating them as propositions. The bathtub as ocean-substitute, the measuring-tape scene, the tooth-loss dreams — abstractions are consistently enacted in objects. The balance sits between Remains of the Day's emotional abstraction (50) and Brothers Karamazov's philosophical debate (75).
Information density: 62 out of 100
Each chapter carries dual load: advancing a domestic grief narrative while also narrating a scientific and existential descent into the deep ocean. Marine biology digressions (Tektite Habitat, Sylvia Earle, Norse mythology, bioluminescent species) embed informational density throughout. The alternating POV and the ocean-depth zone structure as chapter headings further compress meaning per page — denser than Austerlitz (50), less so than 2666 (75).
Narrative indirection: 75 out of 100
Miri's account is shaped by incomplete information, emotional avoidance, and unreliable recall — she narrates the aftermath of something she never witnessed and only gradually understands. What happened to Leah at the bottom of the ocean is withheld for the entire novel and finally presented without explanation. Readers must assemble meaning from symptoms (the silvered skin, the bleeding, the water obsession) without ever receiving a direct account. More demanding than The Great Gatsby (65), less extreme than Pedro Paramo (85).
Symbolic density: 78 out of 100
The ocean functions simultaneously as grief, the unconscious, queer desire, transformation, and the irretrievable past. Teeth (Miri's recurring molar-loss dreams) symbolise anxiety and impermanence. The depth-zone chapter structure maps the novel's emotional descent. Leah's physical dissolution — skin going silver, body becoming fluid — literalises loss as metamorphosis rather than death. The symbolic architecture rivals To the Lighthouse (82) in its systematic use of image as meaning-carrier.
Ironic distance: 42 out of 100
Miri's narration is frequently wry and self-deprecating — she catches herself performing emotions, notes the gap between how she acts and how she should act. But this irony is contained within sincere emotional commitment; the novel does not hold its grief at arm's length or deploy satire. The register is closer to the mild self-awareness of Remains of the Day (50) than to the full recalibration demanded by The Sellout (85) or Lolita (75).
Resolution withholding: 82 out of 100
The novel ends with Leah dissolving into the sea — a transformation that refuses to be coded as death or as survival. What the creature in the depths was, whether Jelka's disappearance is explained, why the Centre behaved as it did: all withheld. The ending offers emotional clarity (Miri releasing Leah into the water) while denying narrative resolution. More open than Beloved (40), approaching Crying of Lot 49 (75) in its embrace of permanent ambiguity.
Structural complexity: 72 out of 100
Dual alternating POV chapters are organised under ocean-depth zone headers (Sunlight, Twilight, Midnight, Abyssal, Hadal), mapping the novel's emotional and temporal descent. Both strands are non-linear — Miri's moves between present crisis and deep flashback; Leah's interweaves the submarine disaster with marine history lectures and memory. An embedded manuscript (Leah's log, delivered to Miri by Juna) provides a third textual layer. More complex than The Great Gatsby (55), less so than Infinite Jest (85).

How Our Wives Under the Sea is regarded

Our Wives Under the Sea holds a literary regard score of 35 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Our Wives Under the Sea sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (109 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Our Wives Under the Sea scores 82 out of 100. A second mythos, tragedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
I imagined the three of us sitting at the bottom of the ocean and playing Old Maid.
Symbol: Mythical (archetypal)
The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.
Mythos: Irony iv (tragic pathos) (irony iv)
What persists after this is only air and water and me between them, not quite either and with one foot straining for the sand.
Genre: Confession + Novel
I don’t know who I’m writing this for, really. I think I need to explain what happened, but it’s hard when so much of it happened in the dark.

Where the story of Our Wives Under the Sea takes place

  • Miri and Leah's first-floor flat in a canal-veined English city, present day (2010 to 2022), the main setting
  • Research submersible on the Hadal seafloor, c. thirty-five thousand feet down (Leah's account) (2010 to 2022)
  • Miri's mother's clifftop house and the beach below, the sea (2010 to 2022)

5 things that are true of Our Wives Under the Sea, with the passage for each

  1. Miri's phone calls to the Centre are met with hold music described as Beethoven's Battle Symphony on a toy synthesiser.

    which appears to be Beethoven’s Battle Symphony played on a toy synthesiser

  2. The book lists the five ocean zones, which also name its sections, and ends the list at the Hadal Zone.

    There are five main layers to the ocean, at least if you go by scientific designation.

  3. Miri brings the bathing Leah glasses of water with table salt dissolved in them.

    Leah is still in the bath, so I spoon table salt into a glass of water and take it through to her.

  4. One of Leah's eyes turns into a globe of water and bursts down her face.

    one of her eyes is no longer an eye but a strange, semi-solid globe that on closer inspection appears to be made up of pure water.

  5. Jelka leaves the submersible through the escape trunk while the others are not looking.

    he was beating on the lower hatch leading to the escape trunk – through which, I came to understand, Jelka had just disappeared.

Scenes in Our Wives Under the Sea that Frye would name

36 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Katabasis, untitled
It’s a curious act of surrender, when you think about it, the act of going under. The submersible's descent is the literal katabasis that organises the book.
Sparagmos, untitled
one of her eyes is no longer an eye but a strange, semi-solid globe that on closer inspection appears to be made up of pure water. Leah's body begins visibly to come apart.
Demonic imagery, untitled
I remember I saw it – the eye, and then the face beyond the eye, the way it rose up from the chasm below us and kept rising The monstrous face rising from the abyss is the book's central demonic image.
Sparagmos, untitled
first my Leah, then the water, first my Leah’s arms, her chest, her ribcage, then the water they are struggling towards. Leah's body is dispersed limb by limb into the sea.
Katabasis, untitled
When you sink – which we did, long hours of sinking – you can’t see the bottom and you can’t see the top The fall below diveable depths is the descent to the lower world.
Anatomy, untitled
There are five main layers to the ocean, at least if you go by scientific designation. An encyclopedic catalogue of the ocean zones that frames the whole book.

Books that share these scenes with Our Wives Under the Sea

About the author

Julia Armfield