At the age of 72, Amos Oz is nine years older than the state of Israel. The fact that he and his country grew up together was memorably expressed in the 2004 memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness, in which the development of the nation was viewed though the expanding consciousness of a young boy with a declared ambition "to grow up to become a book".
It was a landmark publication, yet since the memoir's appearance Oz has moved on to explore alternative terrain. Rhyming Life and Death was a short, sardonic self-interrogation on the business of being a writer; while Suddenly In the Depths of the Forest took the form of a disquieting contemporary fairy tale about a village that had been mysteriously abandoned by all its birds and animals. It created a haunting impression of communal trauma; an anxious settlement where "no birds chirped, no flock of geese crossed the sky and the villagers barely spoke to each other beyond essential things".
In Oz's current book the birds and animals are back, though the enigmatic sense of unease remains. It is not a novel so much as an interwoven collection of vignettes set in an imaginary village whose characters intrude on each other's stories in the manner of a small community where everyone knows each other's business. It's an inward-looking place where, once again, people barely speak beyond essential things. But it's the unspoken sense of dread, or incipient threat, that makes the stories so powerful.
The metaphysical unrest is most fully realised in the central and lengthiest story, "Digging". Rachel, a widowed schoolteacher, lives with her elderly father, a cantankerous former member of the Israeli parliament, who complains that his sleep is being disturbed by the noise of workmen excavating beneath the house. Rachel assures him that nothing is buried down there "except perhaps your own bad conscience". But then Rachel's house guest, a young Arab student who is making a comparative study of Jewish and Palestinian settlements, begins to hear it, too.
The old man makes no secret of his dislike of the young Arab, whom he suspects of harbouring an ancestral territorial claim. The tale brings to mind Oz's famous statement, in the 1967 essay "Land of Our Forefathers", that "even unavoidable occupation is a corrupting occupation". Could it be that the incessant scratching noise is the sound of that corruption made manifest?
Practically all the stories draw their strength from an image of displacement or anxiety. A man finds a stranger climbing into his bed; a lonely spinster puts on a random coat, believing it to belong to her absent nephew; an estate agent is left sitting in an old wheelchair in a dark cellar. Although composed at different times, these stories are structurally of a piece, written in a spare, elliptical manner impressively conveyed by Oz's long-time English translator, Nicholas de Lange. The only discordant note is sounded by a final narrative which shifts forwards (or possibly backwards) in time to an era in which the village is no more than an inhospitable swamp.
This last piece works as a fine apocalyptic fable on its own terms; yet it detracts from the penultimate tale which otherwise feels like the book's natural conclusion. In this story, "Singing", many of the characters we have met before assemble for a sociable evening devoted to "old Hebrew and Russian songs with a melancholy, sentimental air". Outside can be heard the sound of air force planes (possibly, though not explicitly, taking part in the Gaza offensive of 2008-09) and though the conflict is briefly discussed, the hostess insists that everyone "stops arguing about politics and get on with the singing, which is why we are all here".
In A Tale of Love and Darkness, Oz created an autobiographical masterpiece in which history intervened on every page. Here he presents the picture of a society which seems to have lost patience with, or interest in, history: "Once, a long time ago, before all this, maybe here and there some people liked each other a bit. Not everyone. Not much. Not always . . . But now? These days? Now all the hearts are dead. It's finished." For such an inspirational writer, this feels like a disturbingly bleak conclusion. Yet Oz suggests political engagement has become a thing of the past  all one can do now is try to drown out the sound of the bombs by singing louder.