Day by A. L. Kennedy is a complex at times perhaps over a complex novel about an individual’s experience of and response to war. It is set in the Second World War and crucially, its aftermath. It is a novel where the reader is presented with time shifts, changes in point of view and altered conscious states so quickly that only a slow, almost forensic progress seems possible. Though there is much to praise about the book’s non-heroic, matter-of-fact but at the same time respectful approach to its subject matter, it occasionally obfuscates rather than clarifies.

Alfred Day is the book’s eponymous principal character. He hails from Staffordshire, in the English Midlands, a place where coal mining meets ceramics factories, all within a recognizable older rural England. Alfred’s accent is working class and is often expressed phonetically, a practice that intends to preserve the sound of his voice, but often hides his complexity of meaning.

Alfred joins the Royal Air Force and becomes a gunner on a Lancaster bomber, the kind of airman who would sit alone in his glass cage trying to shoot down the fighters that came to attack the lumbering bomber. It was not a role that was often pensionable, and the regular deaths of Day’s colleagues are catalogued in all their gruesome reality.

But what is interesting about Alfred Day’s experience of war is his detachment from it. High up in the sky, his job is to defend a payload of bombs which, if the mission is to be a success, will be dumped anonymously by his aimer colleague on Hamburg, or whatever city might be the target today. The bombs are effectively dumped at random, despite their professed aim., all hitting targets that might or might not have been intended. In today’s jargon, this is where collateral damage becomes the objective. It is interesting in our language how carpet bombing is not the bombing of carpets.

Meanwhile, the airmen themselves must find ways of working together. They also must find ways of talking about what they do without ever really recognizing how gruesome or risky it will be. This often leads to a variety of euphemistic language, where expletives reign, but where expression is often lacking. The relationships made were often short-lived of necessity and, though they also had to form a team that could work together, it is generally the distance between the men that defines their fraternity. This aspect of Day is handled sensitively, even vividly throughout.

Alfred Day does find Joyce, a devoted and sincere partner. The presence of the ‘now’ in wartime seems to heighten their relationship. Neither partner seems to dream of life beyond the moment, whilst apparently constantly referring to it. War takes the relationship, as it does many others. It even seems to take the present, because when they were together it was war that dominated their thoughts, though their actions were timeless.

Alfred is eventually shot down but survives and spends time and the prisoner of war camp, where surprisingly he is quite well treated. But after the war, after his own liberation, he takes a position as an extra in a film about wartime prisoner of war experience. This later reconstruction of a reality he has in fact lived is interleaved with real experience, and for this reader, it was this juxtaposition that was the least convincing part of the novel. These different scenarios, before the war with its abusive family life, during the war flying missions and visiting Joyce, after the war on a film set, are often mixed together in a heady brew of complex flavours. Training the sense to discern location and time can be challenging. In one way, this is the book’s charm, but for many readers the experience may prove merely confusing.

Day is a moving book, but a book that does not give up in sensations easily. It is always challenging for the reader and is, nevertheless, fulfilling, though apparently never in a direct, uncomplicated way.