There is something about A.L. Kennedy’s writing that creates awkward expectations. Reviews of her novels often follow a similar pattern: High regard for her ambitious technique sets up disappointment with the book itself. An accomplished, lyrical sentence working within a rigorous stream of consciousness leads the critic to think: This is where the psychological novel is, now. Ms. Kennedy has indeed inherited something vital from the likes of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Knut Hamsun, and Virginia Woolf. But she is very much a writer of our time, combining high technique with broad invention. It is because Ms. Kennedy is such a masterful writer, stringing up webs of consciousness so adroitly, that I wish her novels were a little more austere, free of sexy backdrops and abundant, explanatory traumas. Her narrative daring should be more free; in her most recent novel, it labors beneath a complex historical scenario, and what should be an elegant stream of consciousness feels more like a well-engineered waterworks.

The consciousness portrayed in “Day” (Knopf, 273 pages, $24) belongs to Alfie Day, a timid, simple gunner in an RAF bomber, flying missions over Hamburg, Germany in World War II. An eventual POW, who returned to civilian life with his wits intact but without any family or purpose, Alfie volunteers to be an extra in a documentary about POW camps like his own. He considers himself an unsuccessful civilian, having broken the first rule of civilian life — never volunteer — and worries that this ersatz Hollywood camp is the closest he will get to a home. Alfie’s thoughts, therefore, range back over his war experience and further back to his home in Scotland. Ms. Kennedy dramatizes his struggle to remain happy, to keep certain thoughts at bay He is lying in a field near the movie set contemplating the smell of his memories, moving from the wool of airman uniforms to the smell of Thames cigarettes in briefing rooms, when he remembers an old gag:

“Hello, looks like London Fog again.” Pluckrose had started them calling it London Fog: the Thames smoke haze in the briefing room — him first and then everybody. One of the things they had between them as a crew: “London Fog again.” But he wouldn’t remember Pluckrose wasn’t going to ask him in.

Chop it. All right? And this time I mean it. All right?

So the noise throttled back, obedient, let him be where he was. Not that he was any too clear about that — his precise location — beyond the fact that he was sitting sitting behind a young moustache.

Ms. Kennedy’s transition into the flashback is neatly signposted by a bit of dialogue, and Day’s resistance to the flashback takes on tellingly, the lingo of in-flight engine operations. Everything is knit together with palpable sense-memories.

But there are problems. The strained violence of Alfie’s repressions and the way he’s written — in the third person and occasionally the second, with italicized interjections in the first — make him seem schizophrenic. We all have thoughts we try not to think, but even in the heightened context of war, Ms. Kennedy makes Alfie’s neuroses sensational. She bombards this simple airman with complexities, making for an overmastered character. Alfie is insufficient to the components of his story, including an abusive father and a misleading love interest, so only an artificially hectic narration can pull him together.

The truly weird thing about Alfie’s mind is the masterful lyricism it produces, in spite of his timid manner. He is an autodidact, and Ms. Kennedy likes to have him linger over a new word — like “dilapidated” — until this becomes a characteristic tic, and a crutch to her storytelling.

There are moments in “Day,” particularly toward its close, when the novel feels startling and penetrating. But these are usually gatherings of sense material, or cinematic invocations of collective stress, as when an entire veteran’s orchestra breaks out whining like air raid sirens. The individual, Alfie, who should bring these moments to a head, has been conceived too low and small to contain all the inventions that flow from Ms. Kennedy’s pen. Previous narrators, like the alcoholic Hannah portrayed in Ms. Kennedy’s “Paradise,” have been wizards of mental chaos; Alfie reads instead like a guinea pig of narrative experiment.

blytal@nysun.com