Unsung hero Hall honours his silent partners

• Rodney Hall's new book is an act of homage to his favourite authors.
• by: Stela Clarke
• From:The Australian
• November 05, 2011

IT'S hard to think of a writer with more enduring talent and enthusiasm for his craft who has been less trumpeted than Rodney Hall.

Not only is he a distinguished novelist, poet and playwright but also an editor, public champion of literature and former chairman of the Australia Council for the Arts. Hall is twice a winner of the Miles Franklin Award, and a Booker Prize nominee, and his contribution to Australia's literary life merits more noise.

Poetry and fiction, Hall has claimed, raise us above the mundane, offer essential nourishment and awaken imagination from its quotidian slumber. Perhaps it is this high literary faith that is borne out in his new book, Silence, with its virtuoso performance of narrative styles.
This collection of short fictions was created with the aid of a smorgasboard of illustrious "silent partners". Hall says the stories contain "echoes, intonations and structures of reason" borrowed from Dickens, Henry James, Samuel Beckett and many others; acts of homage, then, rather than hubris. Yet Silence also may be enjoyed simply as a poet's exploration in prose of the qualities of voice.

Hall, who was born in England in 1935, is wonderfully good at ventriloquising. In last year's childhood memoir popeye never told you, he allows the childish voice of the young Rodney to carry straight to you. He renders the boy's world simply and vividly, creating a captivating return to the day-by-day experience of growing up during World War II. The account feels remarkably fresh, clean of adult hindsight, unfettered by the retrospective contrivances of storytelling.

Hall is a versatile writer, with a mercurial range that may have made his oeuvre resistant to the reductions that aid writerly fame. He has entwined the mythical with the political, history with wild flights of fantasy, beautiful lyricism with elegant prose: he is a bookish Prometheus unbound. Across a long and productive career, during which his volumes of poetry kept pace with the publication of his novels, Hall has demonstrated a remarkable experimental verve and confidence, which are now showcased in Silence.
These narrative vignettes are not really stories and do not strive for structure but are elastically, meditatively and maybe fortuitously linked by the title theme. They take you to wildly divergent places with assurance, restraint and economy. Be prepared for utterly different, sometimes dissonant, flavours.
Full piece at The Australian.

Stella Clarke has lectured on cultural and literary studies in Britain and Australia.
Silence
By Rodney Hall
Pier 9, 208pp, A$24.99