Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
Published 2022 · 60,893 words · about 5 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 36 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.