Books – Joshua Robey

In fictions of the future, automation generally leads to one of two places. Sometimes it is to emancipation from labour and material struggles, in more utopian accounts. The more dystopian (or, some would argue, realistic) suggest it would presage a return to a semi-feudal poverty for the non-owning classes. Yet Jem Calder’s Reward System explores the arguable reality that the processes of automation, data and algorithms have been refracted in upon the self; we optimise and self-evaluate, increasingly treating ourselves as machines. Even exhaustion and burnout are sometimes framed as needing to recharge our batteries.

Calder’s subtly off-kilter structure embodies a sense of being caught between things and compartmentalised. Billed as a ‘set of […] fictions’ rather than either a short story collection or novel, Reward System mostly satisfies as both – even its fringe narratives epitomising the book’s recurring concerns: the infiltration of all corners of life by technology, the difficulty of human communication, and the contemporary workplace. The stories revolve loosely around Julia and Nick, formerly a couple during university, who navigate the modern metropolis and occasionally re-enter each other’s orbits. The first story focuses squarely on Julia’s work and romantic life, while the second follows Nick’s unhappy travail through social awkwardness at a party. Beyond these, the rules of engagement become slightly unclear. The surprisingly touching third story seems to be about neither character – only ‘the male user’ and ‘the female user’ of a dating app during a short-lived fling, while the fifth involves Nick only incidentally, telling us little more about him than his surname. Perhaps it is a deliberate effect of Calder’s writing that I spent much of the duration searching for connection – to learn more about these characters, who at times burn with life, though seem somewhat remote.

Reward System is set in an ambiguous present day, a time firmly in the shadow of an apocalyptic future rather than the past. Its often detachedly omniscient narrator (mostly in the third person, though Nick narrates stories two and six) sets the scene as ‘a December fifty-seven harvests prior to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ projected start date for the era of total global soil infertility’. A pervasive eco-fatalism recurs throughout the book, but it is also a theme Calder interrogates – mapping the threat of global environmental collapse onto interpersonal relationships. A chance encounter between Nick and Julia is sustained not by years of shared experience or mutual interests, but by a reversion to old habits: discussing articles they had read – either on wealth and inequality, unsustainable use of land and fossil fuels, or often the links between both. The end of the world as we know it is a defence against social anxiety.

So too are various other staple malaises expressed and explored – less as comments on the social ills themselves than as part of character neuroses. The narrator notes that Julia ‘had liked saying the impromptu, pornography-appropriated things she’d said’ while sleeping with her boss-turned-boyfriend, Ellery – articulating a thorny mixture of ethical questions over pleasure and the production of desire. Yet though Reward System is suffused with a hyperawareness of problems and the problematic, knowledge is powerless. The characters consume regular updates on every social problem, yet they are largely unable to do anything about it or find ways of translating their feelings into meaningful action. Wry lines such as ‘the overcast midday sky was the colour of the Financial Times’ speak to their informed cultural references, yet they float through a reality in which everything is tragic – and tragically unavoidable.

Julia and Ellery visit ‘a Sackler-funded contemporary arts space’, while Nick surveys an affluent suburb which has been ‘enriched by electric-car charging ports and anti-homeless architecture’. The acerbic tone contains a critique, yet this is largely aimed at the general state of things. The effect is slightly wearying, especially compared to recent works such as Yara Rodrigues Fowler’s realistic yet optimistic There Are More Things, which presents social problems (especially relating to issues of housing, gentrification and identity) to be the fuel of activism rather than the fodder for despair. Arguably Calder’s framing does the opposite. Instead of calling out and petitioning organisations to divest from Sackler investment, for example, their presence is treated as a regrettably immovable part of how things are.

Naturally, as a book about contemporary life, the terrain of the contemporary workplace comes under scrutiny – first the realm of service labour, in a restaurant, and then the digitised labour of semi-creative industries – whose ‘bureaucratic business model […] is to strategically over-allocate professional resources’. Calder explains that, rather than maximising efficiency, ‘the more billable time you can expend on a project, the more money the company can justifiably charge to its client.’ Thus, ‘The best work ethic you can have around here is a bad one.’ So much of what they do is ‘just busywork’ – the kind of pointless non-work labour described by David Graeber as ‘bullshit’. Yet this too is a despairing diagnosis, rather than a call for galvanising action. This is a financialised world in which politics defines everything, yet everything is rendered apolitical.

Reward System comes emblazoned with the endorsement of Sally Rooney, yet for much of the book I wondered if the narrator’s laconic detachment (laced with barbs of emotional reflection and acid wit) was somehow a deliberate, spiky parody of her distinctive style. The coolly impersonal phrasing seems like an observational comic at their most itemising – Julia watches ‘prestige television streaming on her laptop’, while ‘Ellery entered the kitchen texting, artificial keystroke sounds issuing from his touchscreen device.’ Later, a ‘celebrity’ is defined not by their occupation, talents or name, but simply the fact of their fame. Sometimes smart, contemporary observations – such as the exposing quality of one’s recommended watchlist – are cloaked in similar distance; Julia surveys a ‘sidebar of algorithmically recommended YouTube content’ on Ellery’s laptop. Everything is data now, even the building blocks of stories.

The book’s first section, ‘A Restaurant Somewhere Else’, is by some margin the most compelling – powered by a steadily progressing romance and simmering with a low-key sense of danger. The lack of Julia as a focal point can be felt. Only when she is out of focus does the little free-indirect colour she has previously added to the narrative voice emerge. For instance, in a thirty-year-old wine she tastes ‘multiple wars; economic recessions; iconic acts of terror, [and] the rise of consumer electronics’, among much else. Nick, meanwhile, seems frustrated by his own blandness, a curious subject for a character study, but not one which is necessarily riveting. He imagines writing as a form of escape from his life’s disappointments, but we never learn much about the imaginary worlds he creates – whether they are richly different from his real life, or in a similar key to Reward System itself. Perhaps we are to wonder if Nick and Julia will, after colliding on a few random occasions, end up together again, yet Calder denies us such a neat happy ending. One of its least novelistic gestures might be its refusal of closure; the book ends in rupture – with Julia deciding to leave for Toronto to live with her sister and reboot her life, though both stuck in lockdown for now and Nick developing Coronavirus symptoms. Narrated from Nick’s perspective, the sense of grim abandonment – though she has no obligations to him – feels rather bleak.

Late in Reward System, the usually sterile narrator lapses into the second person, and you sense Calder in a more confrontational register. ‘Take yourself, for example’, he writes – about ‘your first smartphone’. He contends ‘you only checked it once every, what, like couple of hours?’ The sudden personal, conversational quality of both the address and the tone is startling. ‘Cut to now. When was the last time you read a full short story without, at some point, taking an intermission to check your device; refresh your feeds?’ Yet this probing interrogates the failure of the optimised individual to maintain an attention span while also monitoring many things at once. It plays as a slightly shallow gotcha, if wryly written.

Perhaps one of the novel’s most interesting contentions is that most forms of resistance have been assimilated by the mainstream. Calder writes, of one of his office workers in ‘Search Engine Optimisation’, that ‘the more she talks, the harder it becomes for her to actually tell if she even really cares about the issue, or if she’s just reciting a series of prefabricated talking points that’ve been fed to her via a giant cross-media broadcasting apparatus.’ Perhaps this is why Nick values writing so highly as it, in theory, is something original, personal, not reconstituted. So much has been swallowed by a technologized mindset which supposes that humans should learn to become more like AIs rather than just AIs becoming more human. The third story, which Calder writes almost from the perspective of a dating app algorithm, describes how ‘the female user paid close attention to each of her embarrassing human surfaces’. ‘She was working on herself, upgrading by increments.’ Humans ourselves have been made not only into machines but sites of labour, where we reify the impulses of capitalism in our own physical and conscious identity. Yet, for a hopeful answer of where we go from here, you will have to look elsewhere.

Reward System
Written by Jem Calder, Cover Design by Luke Bird, Cover Image adapted from an original by Yulia Ryabokon/Alamy
Published by Faber & Faber

Depth structures so much of our thoughts and everyday language. We look for insight by going in depth, hunting for a deeper understanding, going below the surface or getting to the bottom of something. A superficial person is shallow. One can sink low in failure – until reaching rock bottom. Trauma is buried or submerged. Something can be beneath one’s dignity or leave one out of their depth. Go too far and you could even be said to have gone off the deep end or be in over your head. Or maybe it’s not that deep?

Yet outside of literary criticism, depth is seldom given the kind of extended, psychological and thematic focus found in Julia Armfield’s assured debut novel, Our Wives Under the Sea – which treats depth as a site of horror, scientific enquiry, and semi-Freudian self-discovery. Following an ill-fated submarine expedition into deep, uncharted waters, the novel is structured according to zones of ocean depth, in five sections: Sunlight Zone, Twilight Zone, Midnight Zone, Abyssal Zone, and Hadal Zone. Each is deeper than the one before, posing greater and greater mysteries to scientists – culminating in the virtually unknown terrain of the Hadal Zone, named after the ancient underworld, Hades. While depth is often figuratively associated with clarity, truth, and getting the root of something, Armfield’s deep-sea setting reveals an alternative way of seeing (and not seeing) things: the deeper you go, the darker things get. Things get lost in the gloom – of the deep ocean, and the unconscious mind.

Our Wives Under the Sea charts the effects of catastrophe, the pain of not knowing, and the cost of discovery, within the marriage of Leah – a deep sea explorer and scientist – and her wife, Miri. On the fateful mission at the heart of the novel, a submarine malfunction leaves Leah and her two crewmates stranded at the bottom of the ocean, in near darkness for months on end. Without digital clocks, they lose all sense of time. Meanwhile, Miri waits on the surface in anguished uncertainty, hearing little to no news about Leah’s situation. She eventually assumes Leah has died and tries to come to terms with it. Yet also told in parallel are the facts of Leah’s remarkable return, Miri’s delight at their reunion turning to complicated confusion when Leah barely communicates, spends hour after hour sat in salty bath water, and appears to transform into some sort of sea creature – who, at the novel’s conclusion, Miri dutifully transports to the shoreline to release out into the ocean.

Armfield keeps many of the novel’s details if not opaque, but translucent. By the end of the novel, I was left with the distinct impression that the evasive, elusive ‘Centre for Marine Enquiry’, who Leah works for, may have deliberately sabotaged their vessel. Perhaps the mission was less about studying the ocean than about studying its effects on stranded people. Leah’s bodily changes, for the majority of the novel, remain just within the realms of medical possibility, yet squaring these questions literally is, of course, far less interesting than the haunting effects of our ignorance. Armfield deftly balances a bubbling sense of bureaucratic betrayal with the mystical and mythic; the entire novel is like us peering through the gloom, as Leah desperately does at the end of the novel. At the expense of their potential survival, she insists on them remaining submerged, despite the miraculous return of the submarine’s power. Peering through the portholes, she tries to learn the deepest secrets of the ocean.

Within its five sections, Our Wives Under the Sea is constructed from short chapters which nimbly alternate between the perspectives of Miri and Leah. However, the novel actually tells three stories of grief in parallel, rather than two: Miri thinking Leah has perished, Leah coming to terms with near-certain, imminent death, and Miri’s second bout of mourning for the person Leah once was – when she comes back profoundly changed. Miri’s chapters flit from present to past tense, contrasting the current baffling immediacy of Leah’s return with the confusion and Kafkaesque bureaucracy of her absence, as she struggles to extract updates from the Centre.

The novel’s plot is relatively spare, largely free from incident bar the premise I have already outlined, and while this would be to the detriment of many novels, Armfield’s choice to write with a downward motion, into depths literal and metaphorical, rather than in the usual linear forward movement seems inspired. Armfield’s eddying, swirling patterns and juxtapositions draw us into the characters she studies and inhabits. Excessive meandering is avoided by Armfield masterfully controlling the flow of information to the reader, ensuring there is always just enough narrative momentum. This magic trick is helped by the novel’s cross-cutting structure, which keeping a story about stasis in constant motion.

Our Wives Under the Sea is a profoundly moving dual character study, and the character of Miri especially is rendered with a brittle realism that makes her experience all the more heart-breaking. Armfield’s writing here evinces the same knack for scalpel-like sentences that made her short story collection, Salt Slow, crawl inside one’s head. Miri’s narration deploys searing emotional insight in a way that seems effortless and casual, yet also the hard-work lessons of heartache. Armfield toys with language in an intensely satisfying manner, viewing clichés askance and breathing fresh, vital life into them. The ‘error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left’, Miri narrates, at the start of the novel. Later, we read that ‘loving is something we all do alone’ – a lonely revelation surely learned by Miri after having been left.

Leah’s chapters are retrospectively revealed to be entries in log, written to pass the time in the stranded submarine – an insight into a mind under pressure and about to undergo a substantial change. As such, they contain fear and frankness. Miri, by contrast, is more loquacious – ambiguously addressing us and almost seeming to perform for us. Armfield peppers Miri’s chapters with delightful similes. At one point, Miri reflects that ‘I have allowed blame to settle over me like a weather system’, while later a bad kiss is hilariously figured ‘as though he were using me to floss with’. (Armfield’s narrative voice remains preoccupied with teeth throughout; Leah’s gums bleed, the ocean is repeatedly described as having teeth, and at one point, a house is ‘gutted […] of its useful attributes’, and Miri describes how she ‘stole its furniture, pulled its teeth’. In her story ‘Smack’ too, the ‘waves [are] drawing back like lips revealing teeth’.) At times, Armfield’s gifts of comic observation are used in tandem with devastating emotional revelation. The exhaustion of caring for Leah, compounded by not knowing whether she is helping or not, is compared to ‘the way that anyone who sneezes more than four times abruptly loses the sympathy of an audience’. The novel’s jokes ache with human life and limitations.

Armfield’s narrators regularly defamiliarize everyday objects, and the novel has a recurring gesture of re-evaluation. The horror begins uncanny, found in minor recalibrations that signal seismic changes on the horizon. We share Miri’s horrified unease when Leah starts to mix salt into her drinking water. Yet over time, Miri comes to prepare salt water for Leah to drink, in an uncertain act of love. The novel builds towards a stunning metamorphosis – another recurring concern for Armfield in Salt Slow. Most akin to this is the opening story ‘Mantis’, whose title foreshadows a girl’s transformation into an insect-creature which is named only in the title. In that story, a teenage girl tells us conversationally about her ‘problem skin’, which has a hereditary mixture of acne, psoriasis, eczema and vitiligo – but also not quite any of them. Over the course of twenty pages, her skin slowly flakes off more and more, until she transforms into something with wings and malevolent intentions. Somewhat similar is the more minor transformation of protagonist Nicola in ‘Smack’, who finds that her finger has ‘mottled up around her wedding ring’, so she cannot get it off – no matter how hard she tries.

Leah, after days submerged in saltwater, undergoes a strange metamorphosis, which is described only indirectly, in shards of bodily detail. We learn she is ‘translucent, then eventually clear’. It is as if she ‘melts’; ‘the body I [Miri] am holding is becoming less a body’. There is no shift from innocence to violence though, only the slow fade of devoted, marital love into something unintelligible and beyond human understanding.

In ‘Mantis’, it seems as if we are invited to view the transformation as a metaphor for the changes, pressures and terrors of adolescence – a pungent metaphor, and fertile ground for horror. The irremovable ring in ‘Smack’ points to Nicola’s inability to look after herself when alone, as her husband tries to divorce her. By contrast, Our Wives Under the Sea seems to resist reduction to a singular primary theme, instead inviting more exploratory metaphorical interpretation – hunting out deeper meanings that elude simple detection. The novel speaks to grief quite directly, as well as the difficulties of the responsibilities of caring that love quietly confers. Miri’s perspective arguably represents someone coming to terms with an inexorable change in a partner. Early in the novel, Miri and Leah’s friend Sam claims that love is not actually ‘complicated’ at all; ‘if you’re with the wrong person it’s hard.’ Yet Our Wives Under the Sea examines a terrifying question: what if the right person then changes? The novel reads as a sublime metaphorical journey into acceptance of someone growing out of a relationship. Here, through a profound, inexplicable metamorphic shift, Leah and Miri’s continued relationship becomes untenable. Their needs are too different. In this case, it is literally that Leah now needs to be submerged in salt water. Yet any attempt to construct too direct an allegory seems doomed to fail, feeling quaint compared to the rich, unresolvable strangeness of Armfield’s writing.

The novel’s imagery is redolent of sea monsters, swashbuckling myth combined with the real deep-sea surprises of David Attenborough’s The Blue Planet and other similar documentaries. Yet the novel is also suffused with a latent spirituality, particularly fascinated by Catholicism. According to Leah, Miri is a ‘Catholic hobbyist’, while faith burns at the ‘white hot core’ of Jelka, the ‘brisk and rational and often cold-blooded’ fellow sub-aquatic research scientist. We learn that she likes the sea not for any pantheistic wonder at the omnipresence of God, but due to its absence of and distance from churches. Despite Jelka’s adolescent hopes, her gender still forbids her from training to become a priest. Every now and again, Armfield circles back to religion, which contributes further to the recurring gesture of peering into the unknown and hints at another metaphorical reading of the novel’s ending. Perhaps we are to see Leah’s release into the ocean as a symbolic escape from earthly pain (such as during a terminal illness), where death acts as an ambiguous liberation – potentially into another life, in a new form.

These concerns could be considered predictably uncertain; the novel is concerned with known unknowns. Thus, Our Wives Under the Sea is about the horror of the unexplained and inexplicable, yet, for Armfield, horror is also a highly predictable genre. In an intelligent touch towards the end, Leah recalls how Miri describes the obviousness of horror films; ‘Every horror movie ends the way you know it will.’ This implicitly identifies the genre they are in, Leah realising that she knows what will happen, more or less. There is no resolution within the bounds of medical science; horror is so often a genre of predictable descent. Much like tragedy though, of which horror could be considered a debatable sub-genre, inevitability does not blunt its emotive, cathartic force. Genre is almost like a scab to be picked at over and over again – and many of Armfield’s characters cannot resist picking at them.

The ongoing popularity of horror could be attributed, psychologically, to its inbuilt rehearsal of traumas – the reopening of old wounds. In trauma theory, such a decision to revisit early trauma is called repetition compulsion. Part of this is to reckon with previous events, yet there is likely a preparatory function too, so that next time we might be ready. Horror films confront us with the apocalyptic and terrifyingly inescapable perhaps in order to salve our knowledge of our inevitable demise and the uncontrollable forces which govern our lives. Horror is, of course, a deeply psychological genre – perhaps in part due to its predictability. After all, psychoanalysis claims to unearth things that you already knew – deep down. (At one point in the novel, a couples therapist operates a ‘deep listening’ style, arguing that ‘childhood experience could often be a root of dysfunction in adult relationships’.)

The genre is also conceived of here as an engine of metamorphosis: ‘if you’re watching a movie about werewolves, you can be almost certain your hero will become one by the end. If you’re watching a movie about vampires, same thing. Ghosts too’. As Leah is released into the sea, Miri sees it as an ‘alchemist […], changing something into something else’. I was struck by the similarly to a tangential aside from David Graeber (in his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs), where he notes that ‘the most frightening monsters […] do not simply threaten to rend or torture or kill you but to turn you into a monster yourself’. Body horror often has a subtler spiritual component – the crushing of the human soul and spirit into something baser, animalistic, or without imagination. Armfield’s stunning subversion though comes in Miri’s tender acceptance of Leah’s change. If the sea is an alchemist, and the process of change like alchemy, then it could even be an improvement or transcendence. Though Miri grieves for the Leah she previously knew, and the future together they will not have, the lonely love that Miri is left with demands that she does what is best for Leah. The sadness is matched with hope and determination; ‘I know what I am doing now’, Miri realises, as she carries Leah to the water’s edge.

The novel returns to Leah’s perspective for its final paragraph, as she and Matteo are ‘rocket[ing] upwards’ towards the surface of the sea. Armfield implies that this rapid ascent may have caused decompression sickness – also known as the bends – though, of course, Leah’s symptoms are far more varied and unknowable than such a simple diagnosis. As the submarine rises, with the previously irreligious Matteo clinging to Jelka’s rosary, Leah’s ‘sunken thoughts reced[e]’. Instead, she thinks of ‘Miri Miri Miri’. The strongest feelings are not necessarily the deepest, but the ones that are clear and at the surface. So, the novel concludes with the couple apart, yet separately declaring a total, all-consuming love.

Despite the descent into horror in genre, structure and imagery, Our Wives Under the Sea is also a deeply moving love story. Pondering the inevitability of endings, death and ‘the number of times you will defrost the fridge’, Miri rejects the mathematical certainty of the finite span of life and love – instead noting that we ‘simply imagine that whatever time we have is limitless’. Thus, the novel’s end freezes this moment of absolute marital love as Leah ‘wait[s] for the ocean to end’. Love is a lonely emotion, experienced together and apart – its value in the moment unaffected by life’s change and ending, burning bright in the moments that count.

Our Wives Under the Sea
Written by Julia Armfield, Cover Design by Ami Smithson, Image by Nick Fancher
Published by Picador