Review: The Swift Dark Tide by Katia Ariel

This oceanic memoir of desire begins in 2021 by the water, promising a “story of two women who walk into the sea of each other and never return”. Writer Katia Ariel then takes us back three years earlier, at a beach in Melbourne, soon after passion had reared between herself and a colleague, the unnamed “you” that much of this book is addressed to. “You smelled … like mine,” Ariel writes, “You belonged in me”. At the time Ariel had been married for 15 years to her husband Noah, and had three children, two boys and the youngest, Delphi, whose somewhat miraculous survival earns her her portentous name.

The affair is a galactic rupture in space-time for Ariel, casting her all at sea. At first she and Noah agree to open their marriage. Seeking guidance, Ariel delves into her history to uncover the stories of the women in her family, particularly her grandmother Genia, who also had an open marriage of sorts in mid-20th Century Odessa during Soviet rule, where Ariel was born before migrating to Australia. The wild women of her family form a chain, something for Ariel to pull herself along in the dark, “our heavy psyches joined in one long knitted brow”.

The Swift Dark Tide is an ecstatic ode to womanhood. At the dizzy heights of her new queer power, Ariel finds that:

fucking a woman is so right it has changed the way I sleep and dream. It has changed the way I hear music (more accurately: what was once a dance party over the hills is now a string quartet in my living room); the way I garden (every millimetre of fingertips talks to the soil and the soil talks back); the way I feel when I enter a room (not like a child, not like someone who comes bearing apology).

But such titanic transition comes with bereavement, as Ariel finds that:

there are mere minutes left of that, my capacity to make space for the masculine. He knows it and I know it. After two decades of the deepest intimacy, I am disappearing from him and from us.

This is a love memoir that feels uncommonly honest about the costs and compromises of desire. The Swift Dark Tide, Ariel writes, is “a map … the route I used to bring my erotic animal home”. Its narrative wonderfully evokes the process of wayfinding, composed of entries that give the impression of Ariel writing in the moment, not knowing what was coming next. Ariel is deeply attuned to the ebb and flow of feeling. Her prose is supple, stretching and accumulating in the attempt to pin down yearning, that most elusive and universal of experiences, to keep the wave upon the sand. In her new relationship she finds something mythological, the “greatest example” of “the same story, the same obsession that has consumed me my whole adult life: the ongoing love affair between life and death”. What is the sea in this book? Is it vital ocean swims or Black Sea seaside holidays, or drowning? Is it life or death? Sometimes it is one or the other, often it seems to be both. Whatever it is, it is an effective metaphor for all-encompassing, all-swallowing desire.

Gay rating: 5/5 for queer characters, relationships, sex and themes.