The latest novel from AL Kennedy tells the story of Alfred Day, a ‘biddable’ and ‘ordinary’ 5’ 4” autodidact, former RAF tail gunner and prisoner of war. It takes us on a journey through his confused and fractured mind, as he uses the war – and even the thought of death – both as a form of escape and to create a sense of meaning.

Alfred is only 15 when World War II breaks out, and he prays it isn’t over too soon and he’ll miss it all. Desperate to escape his abusive father and drab midlands existence as a fish-gutter in his father’s shop, Alfred enlists as soon as he can as a tail gunner in Lancaster Bombers, which he chooses precisely because ‘You’re the one they’re most likely to kill’. However, as part of a crew that quickly becomes his surrogate family, Alfred discovers a purpose that makes him feel alive for the first time in his life. This is a feeling matched only by his relationship with Joyce, the lonely wife of an officer missing in the Far East who he meets one night sheltering from an air raid in London. He gradually falls in love with her. War makes comradeship and the desire for love all the more urgent and necessary, and between them the crew and Joyce make Alfred want to survive his required 30 operations and eventual capture by the Germans.

Day actually begins in 1949. Alfred is working in a second hand bookshop owned by Ivor Sands, a cynical and bitter wartime conscientious objector. Feeling as depressed and deprived as he did before the war, Alfred decides to return to Germany to be an extra in a World War II prisoner of war movie. The novel begins with him in search of a feeling he was ‘almost sure had come adrift in Germany, in the real prison in 1943, or thereabouts’. However, Alfred’s experiences in the mock camp and especially his encounters with Vasyl, a displaced East European and ex-Nazi also working as an extra, force him to remember parts of his past he’s trying to forget.

Right from the start we know Vasyl is a nasty character when, dressed in his German extra’s uniform, he frightens and chases a local mother and daughter. The main tension of the novel is set when Vasyl is brought down by the diminutive Alfred: from then on they’re in a psychological tug of war of which Alfred gradually loses grip. Vasyl brings to mind Alfred’s own father – a petit bourgeois bully with a fondness for picking on those weaker than himself. But in some ways Vasyl also mirrors the darker side of Alfred’s sometimes pathologically violent personality: both willingly fought in the war to escape their drab small-town lives; both joined up with a desire to kill; both committed brutal murders. The difference is we know that Alfred acts out of a noble, if sometimes naïve, desire to protect the weak, like his boyhood hero Charles Atlas against those who would ‘use force to gain their will’. Vasyl meanwhile, is a cynical opportunist who thinks people are only ‘things that hold’ blood: blood he is more than prepared to spill to get his own way.

In the mock camp Alfred becomes increasingly self-absorbed and unstable. He remembers his time in the real camp looking out for a slow gentle giant called Ringer, and before that the camaraderie with the crew, the smells and discomforts of the plane, and the initial excitement and later doubts about the missions themselves. In some of the most poignant passages of the book, we travel with the crew returning night after night to bomb Hamburg, which becomes a mile wide phosphorescent inferno buffeting the plane and the crew’s consciences, as a quiet empathy develops for the ‘Fucking bastards below’ they’re bombing. This memory resonates all the more with Alfred after the death of his mother in what was probably the mistaken enemy bombing of a nearby orphanage. Feeling guilty at not being there for her, and out of a sense of culpability at how she died, Alfred convinces himself his mother was actually murdered by his father under cover of the raid, and vows revenge. It seems that, just as fighting the Germans in part substitutes for taking on his father, Alfred now blames his father for what Germany has done.

Back home in the present, doubts about the war are compounded by disappointment and disillusionment with life afterwards. Not only has the meritocratic society people fought and hoped for failed to materialise, but the war has highlighted the lack of any real change. Rather than a land fit for heroes this is a Britain of austerity, of ‘brown linoleum and saving for the meter and war surplus and making do’, where class still rules. This is illustrated by the experiences of Gad, the leader of a group of ex-POWs who are determined to use the opportunity to change their identities and start a new life on return from the mock camp:

‘“I’ve wanted it since ‘45”, says Gad, “I’ve wanted it since I realised the best I’ll ever be in civilian life is a clerk in a shipping office in Kilbowie Road. I outranked everyone there. They did nothing. I had a good war. And what did I get?” Sands puts it even more bluntly: “They think we’re scum”, he says, “whoever crawls to the top of the heap will always think the rest of us are scum. That’s the only law”.

Alfred’s failure to find what he was searching for comes to a head on his final night in the mock camp during a concert party. He approaches four British officials who look after the Displaced Persons camp - ‘two bank-clerk sorts with glasses a bluestocking kind of woman and a young chap with a trimmed beard’ - to tell them he suspects Vasyl is a war criminal who shouldn’t be allowed into Britain. Alfred is laughed at and told Vasyl is exactly the type of good, white, Christian stock Britain needs to help rebuild itself. Alfred realises ‘Maybe I never did exactly know what I was fighting for, but it fucking wasn’t that’. In the end, failing for a second time to feel part of an enduring shared purpose, Alfred returns to London to search for Joyce and the individual fulfilment provided by being in love.

Day, on one level, is a brilliantly evocative account of life as part of the crew of a Lancaster Bomber during the Second World War. But it is also a journey through the damaged psyche of someone who used the war as a means of escape, and in the disappointment of the immediate post-war period, something to long for. Told solely from the perspective of Alfred, Day is not always an easy read. Kennedy makes you work to fathom what is going on, intentionally leaving you at times as confused as Alfred is himself. The story not only jumps back and forward in time but also between first, second and third person narration, sometimes mid-paragraph, and occasionally incorporating a flow of consciousness style that illustrates Alfred’s bewildered state of mind. We can only know what Alfred reveals to us, the drawback being that other characters are only ever sketched in, leaving it to our imaginations to fill in their broader lives and selves. But then this is Alfred’s story, and we learn that war may provide a sense of direction, but it’s generally someone else’s and, as Sands says, is really much more about people ‘beating people down like themselves’ rather than standing together.