Andrew Cowan's last work of fiction, What I Know, featured a moderately successful writer who describes his field as "nothing special, really. English provincial realism." The implication that he might have been talking about himself appears to be borne out by the opening of his fifth novel, which presents a timeless evocation of an English country town on market day: "The bunting out, flags unfurled ... every main thoroughfare clattering with traps and wagons and charabancs, dogcarts, drays, even motor cars, despite the shortage of fuel."

The lack of petrol presents the first indication that something has changed. Cowan's first foray into historical fiction takes place in 1916, when the unnamed town is waiting to receive a trainload of wounded soldiers from the front. The local manor has been requisitioned as a hospital, though its owner, Montague Beckwith, is a casualty himself, his skin having broken out in a nervous disorder "like an exoskeleton, or a suit of scaly armour". Beckwith's family owns the galvanising plant which is the town's main employer. With grim irony, the name is associated with the production of "Beckwith's Barbican", a particularly lethal grade of barbed wire.

There have been many novels about the horrors of the first world war; fewer about the uneasy limbo in which people try to maintain their normal lives back home. But images of slaughter are everywhere  if not in the trenches then along the high street, where young boys earn a few bob in the hooligan art of "cow-whacking", driving cattle to market with sticks, where the tormented beasts are herded into pens, literally shitting themselves with fear. And the stench of the abattoir is everywhere. There's an appalling grace about the way in which a slaughterman dismembers a cow: "Carefully detaching the forelimbs and disrobing the carcass, the skirts of skin flapping open, rippling like undergarments, then slipping away to reveal the purple bodice beneath, as shapely as a torso in a corset."

Cowan has a particular empathy for animals. His debut novel, Pig, was inspired by his grandfather's tales of working in a slaughterhouse. In the current novel, Walter is a young private dispatched to France on a boat packed neither with men nor munitions, but mules, imported from the US to replace the horses destroyed at the front. "It snowed and they were stranded for days without rations, the exhausted animals eating the ropes that tethered them, some dying of pneumonia, others of starvation, their war already over, and Walter's own yet to begin."

As in Michael Morpurgo's War Horse, Cowan finds a fresh perspective on human suffering by concentrating on the fate of the animals. But he also draws a deeper, more troubling analogy by connecting the selective breeding of livestock to the early 20thcentury interest in eugenics. Montague's belief in maintaining a pure breed spills over to a secret desire that the war won't be over by Christmas. Among his circle of correspondents are those who advocate "a war that was longer and might act as a purgative, sweeping away what was rotten, reducing the number of fertile males among the residuum."

Montague's enthusiasm is shared by the local pharmacist, Dobson, a supplier of "contra-conceptives" and performer of abortions who believes "urgencies of the age demanded that every responsible parent adopt the practices of the successful agriculturalist." His forward-looking advocacy of a woman's right to choose, in other words, shares the same premise of birth control pioneer Marie Stopes, who disinherited her son for marrying a woman with poor eyesight.

It is Dobson who develops into the novel's most fascinating character; a vindictive misogynist whose extreme tendencies might be dismissed as small-town fascism, were it not for the fact that scions of the left, such as William Beveridge, George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb expressed very similar ideas. It is commonplace to imply that the foot soldiers of the first world war were treated like cattle: Cowan suggests that may be more true than we realise, as the bunting and gala-day atmosphere gives way to reveal some festering and deeply unpalatable truths. Provincial realism it may be; to suggest it's nothing special is too modest by half.