Young Ramsey Crome is a Canadian private mired in the trenches of the First World War. Knee deep in mud, surrounded by exploding shells and dying friends, he’s certain he will be blown to bits at any moment. Instead, he receives a miraculous gift: 10 days of precious leave time – one last chance to taste the civilian life before the big upcoming offensive.

Crome hurries to London, fulfilling a lifelong dream to see the metropolis, and sets up camp in the home of his uncle, aunt, and their two eligible young daughters. Not knowing if or when he’ll ever return, the young soldier embarks on a rapid-fire tour of London, from its theatres and museums to its bars and back alleys. At the same time, he finds himself falling into an uncertain yet urgent romance, even as the end of his leave period looms.

From its opening pages, The Sojourn reads like a tribute to the classic First World War memoirs and novels by such writers as Remarque, Graves, and Canada’s unjustly neglected Charles Yale Harrison. Cumyn’s descriptions of life at the Front have the authentic whiff of gunpowder and cordite. His version of wartime London is also vivid and convincing.

Underlying this careful homage to the past is a surprisingly contemporary critique about the larger historical and political contexts of the war. Through a matrix of subtle references, Cumyn fires off a number of well-aimed salvos at the structures of the imperial/colonial world model, from the warped profit motive underlying its wars to its rigid social class system and its inherent racism (Ramsey, who’s half-English and half-native South American, has a particularly interesting perspective on the latter).

Cumyn also explores subtler, but still explosive, battles between friends, lovers, and family members. Ramsey’s cousins fight for his affections, while he himself struggles violently to escape the influence of his domineering father. Then there are Ramsey’s internal struggles between his ingrained hatred of “Fritz” and a dawning realization that the war is an abomination.

It’s tempting to read such relentless battling as evidence of the sick behaviour of a sick society. But conflict is also the beating heart of healthy fiction, as this literary page-turner convincingly demonstrates.