The word ‘McCarthyism’ entered the lexicon, but for most of us it all happened in the United States a long time ago, and was displaced by fears of violence from terrorists or young men going berserk with guns. Lucy Neave has set out to correct the dilution due to the passage of time. Who We Were shows us what it might have been like to live and work in America during the McCarthy era through a story about two characters born and raised in Australia. Annabel’s parents have a farm near Lake George in south-eastern New South Wales, but she is educated in Melbourne. At university she meets Bill Whitton, another Science student, and they quickly fall in love. World War II interrupts but does not destroy their idyll. After their marriage in 1946, Bill seeks work in a laboratory in New York, while Annabel gets a more lowly job as a technician. Bill makes friends with fellow-scientist Frank, as does Annabel with Frank’s wife Suzy. But Frank, originally from Hungary, and Suzy are left-wing politicals; Bill and Annabel share vaguely similar views but are not activists. At least, Annabel knows that she is not.

As the decade rolls over, Annabel lands a better job with Frank’s boss, but the issue of working in a laboratory whose experiments may or may not be of direct use to the military concerns her, while it seems that Frank and Suzy – perhaps even Bill – may be more deeply involved in ‘anti-American’ activities than can ever be mentioned. It is a highly charged and potentially dramatic situation, but the potential is not fully maximised by the narration. The point of view is always Annabel’s; and because she is kept in the dark – for her own good? for the good of the cause? – and does not ask too many questions, the reader is also unsure what is going on. The murkiness, designed no doubt to enhance the tension, succeeds up to a point, but the withholding mode of author, narrator, and protagonists blunts the edge.

As the American novelist Claire Messud remarked in a recent interview, characters in a book do not have to be likeable. But if we want to spend time with them, we expect them to give us something of themselves. Annabel comes across as an unnaturally closed individual – astonishingly so for a first-person narrator. Her love for Bill is all-consuming, but she does not press to know what he is up to; she is fond of Frank and Suzy but remote from their political passions; from time to time she wonders that she does not hanker for a baby, but is relieved that such is the case; and she rarely thinks about her parents or entertains any desire to visit Australia. It seems likely that this is a deliberate ploy – Annabel’s dutiful, cold-fish stance contrasting with the increasing menaceof the political issues: the growing rumours about Frank, the pointers to the ultimate purpose of the lab’s work on infectious diseases, the menace of Suzy’s enforced flight to Canada. But it leads to a sense of stumbling about in the dark, of going back to reread pages in case something has been missed.

Novels centred around a buttoned-down character need countervailing qualities: humour, action, or simply excellent writing. Alex Miller’s Lovesong (2009) delivered a flaccid hero you wanted to shake, but at least he was a foil to the vibrant heroine, the vivid secondary characters, and the picturesque locales. Neave has adopted a spare, dry style studded with sentences like, ‘Wyeth ignored me. Or maybe he smiled’; ‘The spaghetti was finished.’ It could be intended to show that science-trained Annabel is by choice no stylist, or it could be that the author does not listen to her own prose. The odd gaffe certainly belongs to the latter. Scientists I checked with do not refer to ‘a bacteria’.

In the American way, Neave has included a long list of acknowledgments at the back of her book, revealing that she applied for the Leadership Program for Veterinary Students at Cornell and took ‘a tour’ through the US Army Medical Research Institute in Infectious Diseases in Maryland; the exact relevance remains unclear, but certainly the descriptions of the laboratory in which Annabel works and the daily routines she follows create much of the novel’s interest, as do the nightmare references to lethal infections and their potential usage. Neave subsequently did a Masters in Fine Arts, and now teaches Creative Writing in Canberra. Her first novel leaves the reader with mixed reactions, but certainly with a chilly, if vicarious, sense of the cold breath of McCarthyism, as repugnant as biological warfare.