In this same tutorial, Averill is somehow able to divine and restate the older man’s unspoken grief in terms of his own experience. Next page, he is at Werner Pelz’s house in Eltham, eleven years later, grief-stricken, to collect the letters and papers that he will use to piece together his dead friend’s life and to fill in the gaps Werner’s account of himself. These two vignettes, tender and sad, inform the whole book. Averill manages, with great skill, to build around them and within them a rich and detailed account that neither obscures nor exaggerates them.

Born in 1921 to wealthy Jewish parents, Pelz escaped from Nazi Germany, alone, on the last kindertransport in 1939; his parents later died in Auschwitz. He was one of the ‘Dunera boys’ interned in Australia, before returning to England and becoming an Anglican vicar in Lancashire. As an anti-nuclear activist and questioner of the church’s role during the war, his time in the church was strained, but his philosophical and political writings and thoughts gained a wide audience, on radio, television, and in the Guardian newspaper for several years before he moved to Melbourne in 1975 to teach in the sociology department at La Trobe, until his retirement in the mid-1980s.

Flight from persecution and death made Werner Pelz an exile in the most literal sense, but the book’s title implies more than this, for he was a person most often at a remove from something. His oldest friend, Peter Dane, tells Averill at one point that ‘Werner, in spite of his depth and sincerity, lived to some extent, averted from life, and his own life, and his own being’. This separation is summed up in the sad image of his father’s last letter, a short, stark farewell that followed Werner around the world, postmarked Berlin, Switzerland, Tatura, and the Isle of Man.

Pelz’s reaction to the Holocaust was remarkable. Rather than denying the existence of God, he became an Anglican vicar. It is no clearer to us than it seems to have been to him whether this was to build a new future or escape the past. Certainly, his reaction to the news that his sister was still alive was a strange one, blank and unhelpful, as if, Averill suggests, it would have been psychically easier for Werner if she had died, and he could have closed off his past life completely.

Dane’s assessment, and revelations like this, so at odds with the author’s experience of Pelz as teacher and friend, make Werner recede somehow, and he only comes sharply into focus when the two of them are together in the present, or rather, sadly, the recent past. The biography is interwoven with short descriptions of visits to the dying Werner in his nursing home. These are almost unbearably poignant, but they give the historical account, and Averill’s search for Werner, both life and weight.

This is important because at times the quality of the writing, and the singularity of the characters, make Werner’s life seem like a well-constructed fiction. One example is Pelz’s version of Anglicanism: a long way from orthodox, to say the least. He entered into his ministry with a wife who was his intellectual equal and partner, but who was also socially awkward and depressive, with obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and a young son whom neither parent really knew what to do with. In his first service in the small Lancashire mill town of Lostock, Pelz told the congregation of about fifty not to come to church unless they had a real reason to do so. The following Sunday, his son Peter later recalled, ‘there were only three people at the service. Father was thrilled.’

Pelz galvanised his flock, briefly, with drama and anti-nuclear campaigning, but Averill makes no bones about his loss of interest in his congregation once they lapsed back into prosaic Lancastrianism. Writing became more important than ministry, and his ecclesiastical career limped along, ending abruptly in 1964 at an interview for the curacy of a parish in Hampstead. One of the panel felt obliged to ask him, given his questioning approach to religion, whether he believed in God, at which his wife Lotte blurted out, before he could reply, ‘Of course he doesn’t!’

Pelz’s searchingly philosophical books, such as God is No More (1963, co-authored with Lotte), were at the forefront of religious opinion, well received if not widely read, until, in the late 1960s, changing intellectual tastes left his kind of heartfelt, essentialist ruminations behind. Averill conjures this period in English cultural life, from the end of the war until the mid-1960s, with a sure and gentle hand. One can hear in these pages, beyond all the mockery of the years between, a Church of England vicar on the radio discussing a moral issue, saying something of consequence – and not sounding at all like Alan Bennett.

Averill is a constant but discreet presence throughout the book, as he meets and gets to know Pelz’s friends and family, visits his old home in Berlin, and tries to work out what his discoveries are telling him, if anything, about Werner, and where the boundaries of biographical decency lie. The prose is as clear as Orwell’s pane of glass, though he knows how to use a good anecdote, and the book flows evenly, deeply through Werner’s life.

As Pelz’s influence faded in England and his last collaboration with Lotte, in 1969, I Am Adolf Hitler, purporting to be the last thoughts of the doomed Führer, was another worthy failure, his life shifted to a different gear. Especially in the last years in Australia, everyday sorrows outweighed existential questions: divorce, guilt, undeniable guilt, the loss of the women he loved.

Averill’s quest for the truth about Werner Pelz begins with questions: Can you really understand someone without knowing much of their past? What happens when you do know more? ‘Might I know more, yet understand less?’ he asks, and in the spirit of his beloved teacher and friend he has no answer, except perhaps the one that Werner gave in a radio interview not long before he died: the most important thing is simply to go on thinking.