Book review: Scenes from Village Life by Amos Oz

Let us not beat about the bush, burning or otherwise. Amos Oz is one of the greatest writers at work in the world: wise, elegantly eloquent and unfailingly humane. For the past five decades he has given us beautiful and necessary literature, not least his remarkable, ultimately heart-rending, memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness.

Why Amos Oz has not yet been awarded the Nobel Prize is a perplexing mystery, possibly merely a matter of time or a pathetic example of political pusillanimity. He cleverly manages to offend both the far left and the far right in the fractious cauldron of the Middle East - a good sign for a writer.

Yet, as well as the political activism and pronouncements, which sometimes unsettle well-meaning secular Westerners as much as slogan-brandishing Zionists, here is a novelist of sublime skills. The danger always is that the two are conflated, that his internationally renowned fiction is automatically read through the prism of conflict. Writers, especially those from the Middle East, are often wary and weary of this. Maybe they wish only to write about what really matters: love, hope, despair, family. As Oz has said, "Deep down below, all our secrets are the same."

Scenes From Village Life perfectly epitomises this conundrum: do we read it as fiction of the highest calibre or disguised political comment? The book is a sequence of eerie, perfectly observed, open-ended tales, redolent with loss, longing and loneliness, Seven closely interlinked stories, accompanied by a seriously disquieting coda, are set in the lovingly depicted village of Tel Ilan, a Jewish village a century old.

No Arabs, it is quietly established early on, have been displaced. The pioneers forged their farms and made things grow. Their settlement is now being changed irrevocably by the forces of modernity, the old houses being steadily torn down to be replaced by vulgar modern villas, tractors and ploughs rusting into silence.

Oz seduces us into this world, this place of mists, oppressive heat and cypresses, where the jackals howl at night, where the shots from the mountains are those of hunters, not combatants.

The village's characters appear and reappear, stranded with ageing parents in decaying houses built by their forefathers, their grown-up children in Europe or America.

There is always something not quite right, something forgotten or never quite known. Who is the oddly familiar stranger at the door? Has the beloved visiting nephew ever got on the bus? Has the bed been slept in? Where has the mayor's wife gone, apparently vanished into thin air, her five-word note saying "Do not worry about me"?

Enigma infuses the pages.What is that distant sound of underground digging in the night? A-ha! We all know about the Palestinians' network of tunnels. Or might it be conscience, memory or dreams? The daughter who has tetchily assumed the sound to be merely her senile father's imaginings, at last hears scratchings under the foundations of the house too.

The tone is pitch perfect. Each protagonist is made manifest with just a few brushstrokes, the maestro at work. The translation from Hebrew by long-time Oz collaborator Nicholas De Lange is pellucid, there's not a jarring note. The music shifts key effortlessly. The whole collection is a masterclass in the paradoxical art of invoking the unspoken, exquisitely, in words.

The characters are somehow known to us: the lonely doctor, the frustrated teacher, the couple who resolutely hold communal singing evenings, whose son blew his brains out with his father's pistol under his parents' bed. This is the land of Amos Oz but also, absolutely, of Anton Chekhov. Indeed Oz has written that when he first read Chekhov - in Hebrew - he felt he was "one of us".

Here, Chekhovian resonances are everywhere: the melancholy, the comedy. Oz is a master of observational wit as well as poised mournfulness. As the mayor searches for his vanished wife at dead of night, he breaks into the deserted school where she teaches. There in the classroom, an essay instruction on the blackboard: "The calm of village life compared with the bustle of the town. Please finish by Wednesday at the latest."

Yet overlaid on this is a sense of fable, fairytale even. Things metamorphose, or seem to, in the shifting evening light. In the middle story of the collection, "Lost", an estate agent looking to buy up an old property, the home of a once-famous writer, is led further and further into a maze of rooms and corridors by a bare-footed siren, at last left to his fate in a dark cellar.

All of this means that allegory lurks at every turn. What ancient injustices are being revisited here? What subliminal fears for the homeland? An odd and powerful concluding story, as a degraded, bestial community in a godforsaken swamp suddenly sees an angel-like apparition, is wide open to interpretation. Only occasionally does the political situation intrude - a news headline about an attack on the enemy sparks a discussion that is quickly quashed by the hostess, who suggests "we should get on with the singing, which is why we are all here".

One of Oz's most lyrical novels, The Same Sea, was widely interpreted as a political allegory. His answer? "I wrote it as a piece of chamber music." Here, in the wonderful story "Digging," the cantankerous old politician confronts the gentle young Arab student who unobtrusively lives in a shed on the property.Irritated by his presence and his suspiciously non-Arabic harmonica-playing habits, the old man demands: "And why do you always play sad tunes? Are you miserable here?" Young Adel replies with an irrefutable truth: "It's like this: whatever one plays on a harmonica, from a distance, it always sounds sad."

So let there be the dissections, the dissertations, the feverish interpretations of intent. I propose it is enough, more than enough, simply to listen to the enchanting, subtle, sad melody of this book, let its melancholy, moving notes slide into the mind and soul. Informed by everything, weighed down by nothing, this is an exquisite work of art.