Shot on a continuous loop

Fiction:Becoming a soldier was not enough for Alfred Day. It was not a job he was looking for, it was deeper than that. He needed an experience to justify his existence. He found it when he went to war. The problem is, nothing lasts for ever, not even war. So when the chance came to revisit that experience in 1949 in the guise of a silly film, he volunteered.

Day is more than a novel, it is an investigation into the difficulties of being alive. Alfred Day is an ordinary character, a dreamer who likes reading. He is also the son of an unhappy marriage - his father is a bully, his mother is a victim. Growing a moustache, for someone as traumatised as Alfred, is more than a whim, it is a project, a statement of intent. From the opening, Scots original AL Kennedy, one of the most inventive, confident and, it must be said, subversive of writers, sets out the case of Alfred Day:

It wasn't that he was awkward, or peculiar, quite the reverse: he was biddable and sensible and ordinary, nothing more: but even an ordinary person could sometimes have enough, and get browned off . . .

Yet even as early as this, it is safe to bet that Kennedy will not content herself with penning an Everyman-at-the-mercy-of-ordinary life tale. Nor is this likely to develop into a candid if characteristically metaphysical narrative about contemporary society, as Kennedy is yet another writer preoccupied by the legacy of the second World War. Even a paragraph such as the following still leaves the reader suspecting that Kennedy has wider public issues in mind:

The trouble was, you had too much to do: breathing, sleeping, waking, eating: you couldn't avoid them, were built to need them, and so they just went on and on. What were the other possibilities, the changes you might want to make - like walking off beneath the ocean - not being a fish, he bloody hated fish, but being a man tucked away in the ocean, why couldn't he try that? Why couldn't he try out whatever he thought?

And Kennedy is thinking about wider issues. Day is a low key anti-heroic rebel and doomed romantic who finds a sympathetic muse who has her own problems. This is a love story with a difference, in that it is the promise of a love made difficult that keeps his dreams alive. Alfred Day watches his memories flickering by as if they had been filmed on a kind of continuous loop. His war meant a great deal to him. In ways, it represents his life. But there is also what happened before all that, his time working in the fish shop; his years as the son of a tragic mother, and of course all the fragments of remembered conversations. Not surprising then, that he should be caught up in the debris and impressions racing through his thoughts.

Day is Kennedy's fifth novel in a career which has seen her twice selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. Her non-fiction is shrewd, draws on caustic humour, is sharply observed and dauntingly, impressively, idiosyncratically intelligent. But it is as a short story writer that she excels. To date there have been five collections and two of them, Now That You're Back (1994) and Original Bliss (1997), offer many examples of how well she can sustain a narrative through dialogue alone.

This skill is evident throughout Paradise (2004), her finest novel to date, in which Hannah Luckraft - examine that surname, it is as loaded as most of Kennedy's sentences - chronicles her personal hell. Hannah is almost 40, no longer young enough to excuse her failures, her drinking and her aimlessness.

Kennedy plays it for all its comedy as well as its squalor, including the hopelessly drunk boyfriend. Paradise is funny, unexpectedly touching and assured. In some ways Day is a less powerful personal odyssey, though admittedly Hannah is a memorable narrator with a flair for making the most of her disasters. Her story shouts off the page. She is often almost too fluent, too eloquent, yet Kennedy writes so well that it is easy to overlook the inconsistencies of the characterisation.

This time she is trying to strike a consistent, less self-consciously literary tone. Day, therefore, has to suffer comparison with Graham Swift's 1996 Booker Prize-winning Last Orders. Alfred Day should be a more sympathetic character than the unreliable, self-absorbed Hannah, but he is also far less vivid. The novel is less compelling too, although it is more layered than Paradise and also includes the big theme: the ever-present shadow of war and its consequences. Day, do not forget, is a gunner and so has played a part in many bombing raids which killed thousands of innocent civilians.

Kennedy, however, is never a writer to ignore the potential of a moment. Several of the apparently casual exchanges convey extraordinary eloquence. One of the characters, Pluckrose, an important presence for Day during his war years, asks:

"What am I dropping my bombs on? Am I right? How often are we right? . . . Remembering what my uncle told me. Story from Gallipoli. He said the trenches were very close there and the lads used to yell at each other - the two sides: the Turks and our chaps - they used to yell back and forth, and the Turks, you'd hear them saying Allah this and Allah that, calling on their maker, and we'd yell something back in return and on it would go between the shooting. Turns out, the Turks, they thought we were like them, that we'd be calling on our maker. So they thought the name of our God was Bastard."

Yet while Alfred Day is never more than an idealised Everyman, Kennedy does make her points about war and the shared guilt. Bombing takes its toll, no matter who is dropping the bombs. "As if the cities had been eaten" she writes in an authorial aside, "as if something unnatural had fed on them until they were gashes and shells and staring spaces, as if it was still down there like a plague in the dust." Kennedy's abiding achievement here is one of technical virtuosity in a stern, moral, humane, almost kindly, work which, though often lifted by convincingly conversational dialogue and consolidated throughout by its theme, fails to engage on an emotional level.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

Day By AL Kennedy Cape, 280pp. £16.99