Tearing families apart and pitting brother against brother, civil wars offer the writer an unparalleled stage on which to explore the failings and contradictions of character.

As the defining moment of the republic, the American Civil War was also the point when its founding ideals were put to the test, and when it was made unavoidably clear that the United States is not one country but several; its identity split between modernity and tradition, and between slavery and the individual's pursuit of happiness.

Laird Hunt, in his sixth novel (but first British publication) has chosen what on first appearance is the perfect symbol for the mutability of the self within the chaos and flux of conflict. As with his narrator Constance Thompson though, a woman who disguises herself as a man in order to join the Union forces, appearances can often be deceiving.

Constance leaves her Indiana farm and her husband Bartholomew, a sensitive and fragile young man, in order to fight for the republic against the secessionist South. "I was strong and he was not," is all the explanation she gives, although we sense that her truer motives are buried deeper than this. "I just wanted to fight," Constance says to her Colonel later in the book. "I just wanted to go away for a while." As the Colonel points out, these are two quite separate things.

Toughened by her outdoors life, it takes no great effort for Constance to disguise herself as a man, first as 'Ash Thompson', then as 'Gallant Ash', so-nicknamed after she climbs a tree to hide a young woman's modesty when she tears her dress while cheering on the marching recruits. As the tale of Gallant Ash enters the army's mythology, becoming a ballad and a tale that Constance will encounter in different forms throughout her harrowing journey, the war gets closer and the enthusiastic young soldier is gradually brutalised by her experience of battle.

Hunt excels in his depiction of war, managing to imbue the moments between combat with a surreal and dream-like fragility, while making the action of battle seem like a savage awakening. From initial skirmishes to the industrial fury of set-piece attacks, Constance becomes increasingly estranged from herself as her experiences become more violent and prolonged.

Under her otherwise sympathetic Colonel's suspicion about her true identity, Constance distinguishes herself at an unspecified battle that I suspect must be Gettysburg. Wounded and left for dead, she takes refuge with a nurse who eventually betrays her to the authorities as a deserter. Her secret uncovered, she is tortured in an insane asylum while the war rages around her, eventually managing to escape and make her slow way back to her husband, and to a confrontation with her true motives for abandoning her former life.

Neverhome is written in a lyrical, overly mannered style that anyone familiar with modern fiction set in this era will recognise. Stately cadences and circumlocutions mix with a faux-naïf first-person voice that feels too much like a received idea of how people would have sounded at the time. It's not enough to see a dead cow on the battlefield, for example, but a dead "bovine", and rather than eating it, Constance "might have inquired after its meat".

If there is a sense of the narrative voice not being sufficiently fleshed-out to do justice to the character, the novel also misses its aim very slightly when dealing with Constance's mutable gender. As she intuits on her journey, and as Hunt's bibliographic references make clear, the female experience of the war was not limited to looking after the homestead while the men went off to fight. Many women felt the need to participate directly in combat, and for a variety of reasons. Constance's motives, to mitigate the grief felt at her own losses, are as valid as any. But, while the fluidity of her identity is hinted at, her flitting between masculine and feminine roles rarely seems more than a question of changing her clothes; the farm-girl and the soldier are no more than convenient disguises. If the character at the centre of the book feels frustratingly blank though, the final pages do suggest that her mania runs deep, and that the story we have just read might well be as unreliable as the character who narrates it.