At the heart of Sarah Bower’s beguiling Lines and Shadows is the clever and self-deprecating Ginny Matlock, a talented mathematician recruited to work at a secretive nuclear testing facility off the coast of East Anglia in the 1960s. Her initiation into this outpost of the Ministry of Defence is anything but smooth. Self-conscious about her status as a woman in a male-dominated environment but determined to succeed, Ginny grapples with the low expectations of everyone around her. “Are you the new computer?  I was expecting a guy but you seem to be all that’s left”—this is how Ginny is greeted by her new roommates, Alicia and the boyish Frank. 

Complicating this story of female friendship is a pervasive sense of menace. The novel is permeated by the uncanny. From the moment Ginny arrives, she senses that things are not quite as they should be. Others react with concern and pity when they learn that Ginny is staying in “poor Sue’s room” but refuse to explain what has happened. When Ginny learns that Sue had drowned in mysterious circumstances, she becomes determined to uncover the truth. In her explorations, she encounters the strange figure of “the Artist” who lurks on the shore and whom everyone else on the island insists they have never met.

Bower’s depictions of Ginny’s confusion and sheer nosiness in the face of these occurrences are entertaining and convincing. Bower excels at depicting England at this particular moment. The facility and the town around it feel, to Ginny, “more like the forties than the sixties,” and Bower takes evident enjoyment in this depiction of an old-fashioned place within an already historical setting. From the “nicotine beige” walls of Ginny’s cottage to the tins of jam and powdered milk that the characters consume, this is a vision of England still “making do” in a world of rationed things.  

Such a setting, along with the atmosphere of intrigue and appealing central character, makes for an absorbing story. Scenes such as Ginny eating omelets with Frank and Alicia while discussing Simone De Beauvoir have the simple charm of boarding-school stories. These moments also show the limits of the novel’s feminism. Hearing about the title of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Ginny exclaims, “That rather suggests accepting the status quo, don’t you think? […] if she’d called her book The First Sex, it might have been, I don’t know, more of a statement of intent.” The young women agree on this point without enquiring what de Beauvoir’s actual intent might have been; they swiftly move onto other topics, seemingly content with not knowing. Feminist theory exists for them in the abstract but not as something of obvious utility in facing their own challenges. 

Bower’s motivation in this treatment of feminist ideas is ambiguous. It might strike the reader as simplistic to have Ginny brush aside de Beauvoir with a trite criticism of her book’s title. But perhaps there is some historical authenticity in this depiction of Ginny’s attitude towards feminism. The ideals of this movement were not always so clearly held in the minds of most women in 1960s England: indeed, for Ginny, the prospect of a traditional marriage that arises later in the novel appears far more practical.

Something of the novel’s frustrated feminism finds expression in its moments of the uncanny.  Bower’s depiction of female friendship avoids coziness and twee by suggesting darker emotions beneath a surface of conviviality. Frank, for example, is far from your average Enid Blyton tomboy. When Alicia is not present, Frank displays startling outbursts of malice towards Ginny. Frank even seems to encourage her towards the same fate as Sue: “No one wants you here,” Frank sneers. “If the sea’s calling, listen to it.”

Bower’s depiction of Ginny’s turmoil, both as a woman mathematician and as an unwitting participant in a mystery, leaves many stones unturned. Other elements remain similarly underdeveloped. Take the Artist, a character whom Bower at times describes with quasi-supernatural details. His shoes, for instance, are ghostly: they “leave no tracks in the snow.” However, Bower doesn’t pursue such curious details, and her denouement, during which the story’s various elements are brought together, feels rushed. Just as Ginny’s mathematical ambitions remain ideas “not yet proven,” the intersecting lines and shadows that make up this uncanny story do not resolve into a clear picture.

This is not to dissuade prospective readers. Far from it: Lines and Shadows provides a kind of entertainment often found in on-screen period dramas but rarely in current fiction. Bower dedicates the novel to the people “alongside whom I lived through (and failed to remember) The Sixties.” This book is a joyous attempt to recreate this moment in time. Bower filters the historical setting through the lens of fiction, with all its potential to make things strange and to defamiliarise. She is an able storyteller, and her writing provides a novelistic treat. I just hope that next time, she offers a bigger portion.   

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Sarah Bower is the author of three previous novels and is also a short story writer and essayist. She is a lecturer in creative writing at the Open University where she is also a creative and critical writing PhD candidate. She lives in Norwich. 

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Sarah Moorhouse graduated from the University of Oxford in 2022 with an MSt in English Literature. She works as an editorial assistant at Sage Publishing and writes regularly for The Oxford Review of Books, The Bookseller, and LitHub.