Stone Yard Devotional begins with an unnamed woman pulling up in the carpark of a monastery in her childhood town, after visiting her parents’ graves “for the first time in thirty-five years”.
It is a quiet beginning, spare in its description and detail, but full of foreboding and feeling. There is so much that is unspoken in Charlotte Wood’s seventh novel, so much glimpsed and guessed at but never fully seen – an undercurrent of emotion that is all the more powerful for remaining half-hidden.
The woman is staying at the monastery’s guest house on a retreat of sorts (the word she uses, in passing, is “escape”), in the wake of a professional crisis and the failure of her marriage. She revels in its solitude and silence; she watches the nuns performing chores and their hourly prayers; she wanders through the property, and she thinks and waits, and something in her responds to this in ways she neither expects nor understands.
Months later – the intervening time is elided in the book – she returns to the monastery, and this time she stays. She is, and remains, an atheist: she’s not called there by religion, but by a need to immerse herself in service – to be of service – in some tangible way.
Stone Yard Devotional is a more introspective book than Wood’s more recent novels – more stripped back and less social than The Weekend (2019) and less speculative and overtly political than The Natural Way of Things (2015). Instead, it is reminiscent of her earlier work, in both sensibility and style – in particular The Submerged Cathedral (2004) and The Children (2007), with their confined spaces and atmospheric moods.
In many ways, this novel is about despair, and its particular kind of grief: “I read somewhere that Catholics think despair is the unforgivable sin,” the narrator states. “… it’s malign, it bleeds and spreads.” During her time in the monastery, the narrator thinks often of her parents, and all that she was too young to understand or help them with, especially as each of them was approaching death. And she thinks of her work, with the Threatened Species Rescue Centre, and how futile it has begun to seem as the climate catastrophe approaches.
This grief for the natural world is ever-present, and most strikingly detailed when a mouse plague hits the monastery and town – the result of hotter, drier weather up north – shortly after the narrator moves in. Wood’s depictions of the horror of this plague, and the sheer mass of mice, are visceral and shocking: a flyscreen on a closed window swarming with the scrambling creatures; a nest within the workings of a piano, the felt from its hammers chewed away; an excavated pit to bury their corpses, because there are too many to throw in hand-dug holes..
And climate grief is embodied too in a figure from the narrator’s past: “celebrity nun” Helen Parry, who arrives at the monastery on official business, and disrupts the quiet community with her “dominating” presence. Helen Parry – she is always referred to by her full name – is an activist, working especially on environmental and human rights issues. She continues to work during her stay, taking phone calls and watching new bulletins, and thereby “brings into our home, without apology, everything we so painstakingly left behind”.
Because the other abiding question in Stone Yard Devotional is about “retreat” – what it might offer and what it might mean, and its complications as an ethical position at a time when “all the world’s catastrophes” seem pervasive and overwhelming. Wood does not offer easy answers, and her exploration of this question is always compassionate and curious: this is a novel about seeking, searching, many kinds of prayer. Each character is doing their best, and each takes a different approach; Wood treats them all with humanity and great dignity – and it is this that gives the novel its quiet power.
Other kinds of catastrophe, smaller and more personal, are scattered across the novel, as the narrator remembers growing up in this town: the cruelties of children, illnesses and accidents, suicides and murders, the unfathomable histories of newly settled refugees. These build towards a kind of portrait of some of the social hardships and submerged violences of rural life, and how communities work to mitigate them – but they also allow Wood to explore what it means to survive, to continue on after “great devastation of some kind”, and all of the ways these experiences stay with a person, unreconciled.
This kind of slow accrual is central to the structure of Stone Yard Devotional – it is built of small moments and details, routines and tasks, and the memories they evoke, alongside short interactions and conversations between the narrator and the nuns. The plot is minimal, but finely observed, and because its momentum comes from the growing weight of these incidents and memories, it leaves plenty of space for contemplation – there is work for the reader to do as well.
Stone Yard Devotional is a beautiful and masterful book especially for its ability to dwell within the confusion and complexity of all that it is questioning, and for all of its quiet force.
Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional is out now through Allen & Unwin
