DAY OPENS WITH THE making of a film. It is 1949, and Alfred Day, a former RAF prisoner-of-war, has returned to Germany to act the part of a British PoW. The set is a disturbingly accurate mock-up of the camp that he remembers, and Alfred must keep reminding himself that this is a retelling, a representation with its own agenda, not the raw, monotonously lived truth. It may even be a misrepresentation.

A. L. Kennedy shows characteristic boldness in beginning with a reminder that retelling is exactly what she is up to, and that her war is a fictional act. Sixty-two years have passed but the film-makers, documentary dramatists and novelists are still on set.

Alfred spent his war as part of a bomber crew, a gunner in the tail turret of a Lancaster. What Anne Karpf has memorably called “the war after” is still raging inside him in 1949. He is possessed by the loss of everything that the war so briefly offered him — a crew.

In a life of regular, appalling danger, crew is home, recognition, and belonging. With your crew you can navigate, attack and defend yourself.

Tale of war and redemption

A.L. Kennedy's harrowing story of a Second World War bomber crew was hailed as a masterpiece

• Day by A. L. Kennedy

Background

• Bookies pick Kennedy as Costa favourite

• O'Flynn wins Costa

• Do your homework

Membership of a crew is also a form of permission to love. Kennedy teases apart the strands, showing how individual identities change so fast under the pressure of repeated bombing missions that group identity almost replaces them.

This Lancaster crew is welded together from seven men who might seem to have little in common, but who cannot survive except as parts of one another. They share experiences that are incommunicable to anyone who does not fly, night after night over hundreds of miles of hostile territory, to drop bombs on Germany.

They develop their own rituals, sing their own songs and seal themselves inside a world where everything from the life expectancy of young men to the tilting horizon is upside down. This is a densely written, complicated novel, which rarely slips into judging the furies of total war out of their context. Day doesn’t possess the casual immediacy of Len Deighton’s Bomber: Kennedy’s crew will never paint “Joe for King” on their fuselage.

Instead, it reminds us insistently that it is a novel, an artefact, the product of research and decisions. The use of flash-back and stories within stories, the nods to Elizabeth Bowen and D. H. Lawrence reinforce this awareness on the reader.

Kennedy writes with keen, precise, quirky intelligence and artistry. Her dialogue calls to mind Bowen’s war-time short stories and her great novel The Heat of the Day. Once the reader falls into step, the deliberated cadences flow: “ ‘Will we just go then?’ ‘On the op? Oh, I should suppose we might as well. It would please them, wouldn’t it — if we did.’ ” There are beautiful moments, such as when Alfred talks over the fence to a farmer who works the fields next to the runway. The farmer would talk about what had grown where they were standing, over on the war’s side of the fence. But this beauty also contradicts itself, because in total war there is no “war’s side of the fence”. Food production is part of “the war effort”, civilians are deliberately targeted.

Alfred Day wants his war, and, indeed has fled to it from a sly, violent father and a loving, victimised mother. This part of the novel feels awkward: his family is sketchily drawn, and his parents come across as types rather than individuals. His background as a working class boy growing up in Staffordshire before the war is unconvincing, despite the use of Black Country dialect.

Alfred’s relationship with an upper-class woman named Joyce is also quite shadowy, having none of the force of his involvement with Pluckrose, Molloy, Skipper or the Bastard.

Crew is everything, and the rest of life falls away. After the war, when the crew is finished and the retellings and recriminations begin, there is nowhere left for the man Alfred has become. His lost, angry, passionate conversation with himself is the best and most sustained thing in the book.

DAY by A. L. Kennedy

Cape, £16.99

Click here to buy Day

Times Recommends

• 10 things you should avoid in hospital (unless there really is no option)
• Exclusive: Philip Pullman's essential reading list
• The White War by Mark Thompson