Our Wives Under The Sea - Julia Armfield
There's something about this book's tone and the voice of the main narrator - there are two narrators, Miri and her wife Leah, both equally important, but to me it seemed that this is very much Miri's story - that really put me in mind of Roisin Lanigan's I Want To Go Home But I'm Already There, which I read earlier this year and loved. It's a sense of the slow uncovering/revealing of something momentous and world-shifting, combined with a deep longing to return to a simpler time before all this happened and things weren't quite so complicated.
The juxtaposition of the two voices - Miri on land, caring for her wife after she's returned from what happened; Leah at the bottom of the sea, slowly showing us what happened - works really well. Both are strong and distinct, both are gripping even though really not a lot actually occurs, and I found myself both rushing to get through this to find out what was going on while also trying to sit back and savour it because I was enjoying the prose so much.
While I enjoyed this a lot, it does run into some problems in the finale that are partly to do with the fact that this is a very high concept book that's trying to keep itself grounded in 'reality'. As things get weirder the book begins to draw towards a conclusion that doesn't quite work, with the underwater sections especially starting to struggle under the weight of everything they've built towards. I often complain that books don't have enough 'what' or 'why' for me, but here I think the attempt to provide some explanation for what actually happened under the sea ends up weakening the overall effect of the book. The revelation of what Leah and her crew experienced isn't really a revelation at all and ends up feeling very anticlimactic. There's already plenty of ambiguity in the book, and I think we would have been better served leaning into it even more here and simply being left to wonder.
That's a minor criticism, though. This is very good and I really enjoyed it.