Dickey drew upon his own experience as a combat pilot in World War II and on three decades of brooding to produce Alnilam, a large, ambitious work. "You can't stop a man from talking, once he's been in a war," says Captain Whitehall, a fictional navigator who might be commenting on the capacious book in which he appears.

Frank Cahill, a middle-aged carpenter who has built himself a small amusement park in Atlanta, has recently gone blind from a sudden attack of diabetes. When he receives a telegram informing him that his son Joel has been killed in an Air Corps training accident, Cahill takes Zack, a ferocious companion who seems more wolf than dog, and boards a bus for Peckover, North Carolina. It is January 1943, and Cahill and the reader spend several days at the Army Air Corps training camp attempting to understand what has...