Rodney Hall is a fox, and a particularly cunning one. His twelfth book of fiction, Silence, is on one level an unassuming collection of prose sketches and short stories. But on another level it is a quietly ambitious work that pays its respects to some of the most distinctive stylists ever to pick up a pen. Its twenty-nine stories are concise, the average length perhaps half a dozen pages. Several are no more than fragments. They roam widely in time and place, acquiring a loose thematic unity as a result of their interest in acts of wordless communication and moments at which telling absences make themselves felt. Yet it is as a book of prose imitations that Silence proves to be intriguing. Within its pages one can find Hall appropriating the mannerisms of such idiosyncratic writers as Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, William Faulkner, Henry Green, Malcolm Lowry, Hermann Broch, Joseph Furphy, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. These imitations are sometimes playful, but they are not necessarily parodic. Most of them occupy an ambiguous space between formal exercise and sincere homage, and they give an extra dimension to what might otherwise be little more than a collection of odds and sods. They are also a credit to Hall’s extraordinary versatility and his fine sense of craftsmanship.

Not all of the inclusions are imitations, however. Several are autobiographical. Two of the most memorable stories, ‘L’Étoile Bleue’ and ‘Querencía’, are based on their author’s youthful adventures in Europe. In the former, a footsore backpacker arrives on the doorstep of a French hostel, only to find it occupied by a lone woman whose refusal to speak makes it clear that he is not welcome; he departs and soon after discovers the terrible reason for her silence. The latter describes in vivid detail a bullfight in which the coup de grâce is botched by a novice matador, destroying any claim the savage ritual might have to artfulness. ‘Babak’, too, is a relatively straightforward descriptive story that bears witness to the inhumanity of the punitive attitude Australia has officially adopted toward asylum seekers in recent times. How anyone can fail to be sickened by a government policy that results in people sewing their lips together out of sheer desperation remains mysterious to me, but Hall’s short account of a protest at a detention centre during the Howard years not only manages to convey something of the bewilderment of the incarcerated refugees, but also touches on the peculiar combination of vindictiveness and indifference to suffering that underlies the collective psychosis that has gripped the nation on this issue.

The individual who stands alone against institutionalised oppression and violence is a recurring figure in Hall’s fiction. In his recent novels The Last Love Story (2004) and Love without Hope (2007), he has shown an interest in the way that an individual act of resistance can appear to be a form of madness, simply because the power structure that is being opposed is so overwhelming that it seems incontrovertible. There are occasional intimations of this in Silence. It begins with a two-page sketch from the point of view of some Allied soldiers in World War I, who are nonplussed to see a German soldier leap from the enemy trenches and stand in full view, at the risk of his own life, to deliver a semaphore message across no man’s land informing them that he is starving. One of the last stories, ‘Winners’, is a Céline-like rant directed at the author by an agitated man standing on a Melbourne street corner. The comprehensive denunciation of the system he delivers is disjointed and semi-coherent, but Hall’s furious interlocutor is only mad north-northwest.

The primary inspiration for the stories in Silence is historical. The majority are imaginative responses to real events, such as the death of James Cook or the mass destruction of books that was ordered in East Germany as the Berlin Wall was coming down. Combined with the imitative dimension of Silence, this often takes the form of an interesting game of ‘what if’. What if William Faulkner told the story of the 1908 murder of an African-American political activist? What if Henry James described an uncomfortable dinner attended by Sir Richard Burton and Bram Stoker? What would it be like if Bruno Schulz wrote a character sketch of Judith Wright? The answer in each of these cases is a compelling piece of writing. The latter, in particular, gets my vote as Silence’s finest moment. Titled ‘A Conservationist’, Hall’s portrait of the elderly Wright – a woman as firm in her convictions as she is chronically hard of hearing – is good-humoured and affectionate, a fitting tribute to a poet of tremendous integrity.

There are, it must be said, a few throwaways padding out the volume, though even these tend to encapsulate an intriguing idea. One of the shortest inclusions, consisting of a single elegant paragraph, describes a Korean servant woman’s determination to leave a house in a state of immaculate tidiness as a symbolic rebuke to the invading Japanese army: an attempt to make the soldiers ashamed of their destructive behaviour. Another fragment imagines a bowdlerised Gettysburg Address that has been legalled and found to contain ‘numerous infringements of intellectual property rights’. It is an amusing concept, but rather slight.

It is, however, one of the book’s exercises in belles-lettres that offers itself as the thematic key. In a short essay, a handbook published in 1884 called Knots, Ties and Splices is subjected to a mock-scholarly analysis. The essay is itself a kind of knot, its conclusion bending back to its beginning. The narrator is moved to observe that the volume’s concern with the practicalities of knot-tying takes no account of the symbolic implications of knots. Furthermore, when it comes to the issue of untying knots – an act in which ‘we are metaphorically reaching the centre, the cabalistic unravelling of thought’ – the book has nothing to say. To this observation is appended Silence’s sole footnote, a momentary breaking-free of the essay’s closed structure that suggests the value of a fragmented view and the possibility of tangential insights: ‘May have ironic application to the book you hold in your hand right now.’