Formidable questions, subtle answers: a veteran of the Great War battles with personal ghosts and political uncertainties.

The Famished Lover Alan Cumyn Goose Lane Editions 310 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780864924483

Alan Cumyn's new novel, The Famished Lover, is a sequel to his earlier novel, The Sojourn, which tells the story of Ramsay Crome, a young Canadian painter turned soldier who is granted a week's leave during World War I. During his time away from the front, Ramsay travels to London to visit his uncle and, while there, falls in love with his cousin Margaret, who is already well on her way to being engaged to someone else. All the same, she and Ramsay exchange furtive kisses, go for long walks, see plays, visit Westminster Abbey, talk about him painting her portrait, argue about the war and then, with almost everything left unsaid between them that needs to be said and definitely without sleeping together, Ramsay returns to the battlefield where he has barely enough time to turn down a transfer away from the front before being captured by the Germans. So ends The Sojourn, a novel that, in leaving readers with so many vexing questions, may have provoked some of them to write sequels themselves rather than wait for one to appear.

The Famished Lover picks up the story after Ramsay has not only returned to Canada but also married a woman who is manifestly not his cousin. The novel begins on Ramsay's wedding night, as he and his bride, Lillian, are on their way to an isolated cabin near Montreal. Lillian is much younger than Ramsay, which is a way of saying she knows next to nothing about the war that has become the central fact in her husband's life. This is recognizably a return of one of Cumyn's key motifs, the incommunicability of the experience of being on the battlefield. As in The Sojourn, Ramsay is asked by many what it was like to be in battle, and for the most part he has nothing to tell them. War isolates, Cumyn seems to be saying, and Ramsay's inability to speak of it is a sign that his reintegration into civilian life has been a failed project--that, even after peace has been declared, the war continues for some.

Ramsay's isolation is emphasized early; even before our newlyweds have reached their destination, they come across a monument to the war dead, which prompts Ramsay to descend from their carriage despite Lillian's objections. Looking at the monument, Ramsay forgets about his new bride, and when she upbraids him for the foul language that emerges as he thinks about the war, he wonders how he could possibly have married her. This is bad, but things get worse when Ramsay finds himself thinking about Margaret as he consummates his marriage. It is an untimely reminiscence, to say the least. Later, Lillian finds concrete evidence that there is something awry when she discovers drawings of Margaret in the nude, done by Ramsay.

At the same time as we follow the story of Ramsay's fortunes in the late 1930s, we are also given a series of flashbacks that show us the various indignities endured by Ramsay while a prisoner of war, how he survived and how, through it all, it was the sustaining idea of Margaret that kept him alive. There is a great deal of meticulous research behind these sections, but never does the reader feel the weight of it; indeed, it is Cumyn's unique ability to present a world fully furnished with vivid historical particularity that draws the reader into the novel. Moreover, it is striking how powerfully Cumyn's rendering of Ramsay's experience resonates with the headlines of today, when questions about the rights of enemy combatants are being raised with such particular force south of the border. As a prisoner of war Ramsay suffers terribly--and then returns home to find that not a few people think he has somehow shirked his duty because he has been a prisoner.

This is a bitter discovery, made more so by the fact that his service is often entirely forgotten in a world that is speeding toward another war. Of course, we have been through this war many times, in documentaries and newspapers and novels and movies whose cliches sometimes threaten to supplant the now quite faded reality of that first global conflict. The subtlety of Cumyn's purchase on this material resides in his determination to make Ramsay both wholly traumatized by the war and unflinchingly resolute in his conviction that military intervention is sometimes a necessity. It is easy to see how the novel might have become a humourless strident tract relating a former soldier's conversion to passivism; but the intelligence and perhaps also the pragmatism of the author render it quite otherwise. It is no accident that, in the final pages of the novel, a mother asks Ramsay to speak to her son, a young man who is already thinking of enlisting in the conflict that will become World War II. Because Ramsay has experienced the horrors of the battlefield firsthand, she thinks, he will be able to disabuse her son of any notions he might have about it being a great and glorious thing to die for one's country. Dutifully--and Cumyn's Ramsay is nothing if not dutiful--he does his best, only to have the young man turn and ask, "Would you fight against Hitler?" It is a most difficult question, and Ramsay is quite unable to say he would not. Here is Cumyn's great strength as a writer of historical fiction: his ability to give us a sense of the past not as decided fact, but as hugely contingent, as the product of decisions made by people who were faced with formidable questions.

But Ramsay's biggest problems are of a romantic character: he is stuck in a mostly loveless marriage with a woman he has very little in common with. After losing his job as an artist at an advertising agency, Ramsay manages to eke out a living doing risque calendar paintings of various women in various modes of undress, which soon leads to a passionate affair that makes his marriage seem all the more hollow. And then, just when things are getting difficult, they are made nearly impossible by the arrival of--who else?--Ramsay's long-lost, older but still quite lovely cousin Margaret. Will there be a part three, a sequel to this sequel? Do not bet against it.

The Famished Lover is a compact, well-written and highly entertaining novel. For all the hand-wringing that has gone on of late in the Canadian press about the historical novel being an exhausted and outworn genre, this book demonstrates the continued vitality of the form, the peculiar manner in which the novelistic imagination is able to seize upon a particle of the remote past and turn it into something mesmerizing and deeply affecting, and also surprisingly contemporary.

Steven Hayward teaches in the English Department at John Carroll University in Cleveland. His book The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke (Random House, 2005) is a historical novel about Italian and Irish communities in Depression-era Toronto.