In Austerlitz, W G Sebald describes how ‘when memories come back to you, you sometimes feel as if you were looking at the past through a glass mountain’. In his new book, Malcolm Gaskill reaches for Sebald’s image, which encapsulates the limits of trying to reconstruct the past. You might see what’s on the other side of the immense ‘cloudy prism’, but only ever imperfectly. 

The Glass Mountain traces the wartime exploits of Gaskill’s great-uncle Ralph, a military policeman from Yorkshire who fought in the deserts of North Africa, was a prisoner of war in Italy and escaped from a railcar using cutlery. Like so many who were disabused of romantic notions of combat after 1939, Ralph comes across as both an everyman and an individual. He seems to have spoken little about his experiences during the war, confining his recollections to a few notebooks in which the first names of his comrades are never mentioned. He was aloof and, as a cousin of Gaskill’s mother recalls, ‘a loner’. Yet Gaskill’s painstaking efforts reveal some of the troubled person. In this rich, engrossing book, he succeeds in his aim of writing ‘a story that in good conscience feels real’. 

To Gaskill, the story of Ralph’s life ‘seemed less like a string of facts than a handful of moments, the flashes and shadows of a dream’. He set about fleshing out his great-uncle’s sparse memoir through painstaking archival research and visits to Italy, which brought chance encounters. ‘Without seeing the