All too often war is condensed into meaningless Arabic numerals. It becomes place names and dates. It becomes a simple sum game of territory exchanged and penalties levied. The different wars (spoken aloud like different varieties of vegetables) acquire snappy appellations—The War on Terror, Desert Storm, The Great War, World War II—and little kids play them out in their sandboxes. War becomes a commodity sold as Hollywood movies and Toys “R” Us action figures. The cost of it, the real human cost of it all, is often forgotten.

A.L. Kennedy’s “Day” is an apt antidote to the numbing effects of consumerism, statistics, and history. “Day” does what good literature is supposed to do, that is, not allow us to simplify away life. It deposits us in the most complex theater that exists, the human mind, and from there we watch protagonist Alfred F. Day struggle with the only two things perhaps equally complex, and unstintingly envisioned as such by Kennedy: war and love.

Five years may have passed since World War II, but the eponymous Day, former Sergeant and gunner in Her Majesty’s Royal Air Force, relives the war day in and day out. Understanding he can never move forward until he buries the corpses littered throughout his memories, Day returns to a POW camp in Germany with the avowed intent to work as an extra on a film there, but secretly hoping to “work out his own little pantomime inside the professional pretense and tunnel right through to the place where he’d lost himself, or rather the dark, the numb gap he could tell was asleep inside him”.

But what he finds when he arrives in Germany is a waking nightmare, a camp full of people trapped in the war: ex-soldiers attempt to complete digging the actual tunnels they never finished during the war and ex-Nazis break limbs and faces while masquerading as innocent displaced persons. Day cannot help but think, “Everybody is mad here, all permanently mad.”

And the plot is far and away the work’s least compelling feature. Certainly, had Kennedy handled her plot with any less dexterity, Day’s perception of place and time as fluid rather than fixed would have dragged the novel into disconnected stasis. And it is a feat that Kennedy manages to portray the human mind with (most of) its disorder and associative tendencies, and still drag a story out of it—though, at times, Kennedy exposes her narrative manipulations, clustering beloved ones’ deaths suspiciously close together or violating the mind’s logic by planting too-linear sequences of thought in Day’s brain.

Virtually flawless, however, is Kennedy’s rich language and the even richer character who takes life from it.

Kennedy writes like a smoother T.C. Boyle, her Britishisms landing softer on the ear than the American slang Boyle bandies about. She has his wit, his lyrical vision, and his ability to slice keenly with language, to be precise and poignant. But her sentences haunt and linger longer than her American counterpart, particularly when she fearlessly confronts Day’s disillusion: “Alfred supposed bits of dream would always work out through him now—the way that tiny shrapnel splinters would sometimes break up through his skin, finally leave him.”

With sentences such as that, a boring, flat protagonist is not even a possibility—and Day is certainly neither. At first glance, Day could be written off as just plain mad, but Kennedy refuses to allow us to discount her character in the least; she deposits her readers directly in the tempestuous sea of Day’s mind. In this realm, past and present merge into each other, and fragments of self-taught Shakespeare are swept by the currents alongside recollections of patricide. It is here that Day exposes his full self to scrutiny. All is bared: his torturous conception of love, his conflicted feelings about his low class origins, his insatiable desire to learn.

Cogito, ergo sum: And so from Day’s thoughts, a human being is born. Profoundly violent (apparently his sole solution to interpersonal disputes is his fist), he is also profoundly sensitive and reflective. And, while hesitant to admit it, Day is intellectual. Day is full of self-loathing, at times even half-hoping to die: “Human beings, we’re the worst stink in the world, like a disease.” And yet he maintains, more or less constantly, a near-instinctual hope in his eventual rehabilitation and an almost unwilling determination to press on.

It is this fact that makes it impossible to not like Day, not to sympathize with him. Even when he chooses to be a tail gunner because “you’re the one they’re most likely to kill,” Day still reaches for every book, still infuses every song with all his soul. Half-despite himself, his will to live is indefatigable.

And the book’s most beautiful passages, its most cutting scenes, are when Kennedy plumbs this reluctant desire for life, finding it inextricably tied to art, to stories and song, as in the scene where Day belts out “Jerusalem” before the entire fake POW camp:

“And he can believe that he hears [his best friend] Pluckrose singing, that lovely awful voice, and they are here together again and yelling the England that will never be...”

“And he can believe that if he opens up his eyes the benches will be full of all the boys lost to the sky and his friends the closest, his crew, the closest, so near that he can take their hands and know they are well and never were harmed and never were frightened, never lost.”

“And he can believe that he is forgiven.”

“He can believe so much, the truth of it makes him weep.”

With words such as these, Kennedy illuminates war’s real, true human cost: the utter extirpation of belief. And that, Kennedy stresses, is more terrible than death itself. Death is much, much simpler.

—Staff writer Sanders I. Bernstein can be reached at sbernst@fas.harvard.edu.