June Hutton’s Underground follows Canadian Al Fraser from his time as a 16-year-old boy soldier in the First World War, through labour jobs and work camps during the Great Depression, to a final combat stint in the Spanish Civil War.

Al’s story begins with an explosion on the front, rendered in exquisite detail, which results in his body being saturated with sand and shrapnel, the latter gradually floating to the surface of his skin, emerging piece by piece over the course of his life.

Hutton lavishes careful attention on the physical details of Al’s interactions with earth in a motif connecting the physical underground with the subconscious and death. Al is constantly descending beneath the surface of the world: mining, digging roads, and hiding in subterranean passages. Inverting this motif, his memories of war arise like the shrapnel beneath his skin.

Despite the pains Hutton takes to visualize Al’s odyssey – for instance, taking a full page to show him bringing buckets of snow inside – the reader is unable to perceive the effects of the physical environment on the book’s characters, so the careful detail neither affects nor advances the story. Al’s motives for travelling from one place to another are left entirely unexplained, as is the assistance he receives from a series of secondary characters. While Hutton may intend to dramatize a kind of aimless fatalism on Al’s part, the result is a confusing chronology, with no explanation as to the motives or means of the protagonist’s peregrinations.

Al’s relationships are equally opaque. The emotional history and behavioural tics of his family, fellow soldiers, co-workers, and friends is insufficient to present their interactions clearly or effectively. An excellent example of this problem is the alacrity with which Al’s three romantic interests, without any obvious motivation, prelude, or even conversation, leap into sexual relations with him. Most of the flat dialogue has the same failing: it provides neither motivation nor illumination.

Had Hutton developed the characters, relationships, and plot in her book as fully as she does the attentive visual detail and Freudian themes, the novel could have proved insightful and affecting. As it is, the reader is left puzzling over why, and how, anything in the story happened at all.