Review of STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL by Charlotte Wood

 3.5 Stars

Slow, meditative novels dominated the 2024 Booker Prize for Fiction. This title was on the shortlist.

The narrator is an unnamed woman who worked in a Threatened Species Rescue Centre. She leaves her job and her marriage in Sydney and joins a convent in her childhood town in New South Wales. She doesn’t convert; she becomes an oblate, not a member of the religious order but offering herself in service to it. She despairs about the state of the world and wants to withdraw and reflect on her life. She believes the routine, solitude, and quiet of the convent will allow her to contemplate grief, forgiveness, and atonement.

There is minimal plot. Only three events occur: the remains of Sister Jenny, a nun murdered years ago in Thailand, are repatriated; Helen Parry, an activist nun working on environmental and human rights issues, arrives and brings the noise of the world with her; and the region suffers a plague of mice which swarm the convent after a drought in the north.

The description of the mice is visceral. The narrator admits to hating them: “Their stink, their rapaciousness and skittering feet. . . . At night . . . No birds, no psalm practice, no miscellaneous noises . . . Only mice feet overhead, pattering across the ceiling and inside the walls.” The narrator wakes up to “see that the flyscreen over my closed window is crawling with leaping, climbing mice.” At one point the mice begin to feed on their own dead. The scene where the woman opens the car door and feels “a squirming sensation” at her back only to discover a dozen mice will not leave me.

It is the flashbacks to the narrator’s childhood that were most interesting to me. Her relationship with her mother receives most attention. It’s obvious that she was deeply influenced by her mother: “I never knew anyone else who had her reverence for the earth itself.” A major regret is her not having understood her mother better and therefore not helping her more as her death approached. The woman realizes her inability to recover from her parents’ death; she describes this as “a source of lifelong shame to me.”

For me, it is not the narrator who is most memorable; it is Helen Parry who steals the show. Helen and the narrator were classmates and she remembers Helen as a vulnerable, needy child with a negligent mother; Helen was treated as an outcast and terribly bullied. Now she seems invulnerable and so confident that she requires no affirmation from anyone. Her comment at the end shows wisdom: “’I loved my mother, and she – tried, as much as she was able, to love me.’” I’d love to read a book focusing on Helen and her development into “the radical environmentalist nun.”

The novel asks what is the appropriate response when there are so many problems that require our attention. Sister Jenny insisted “on the immorality of staying” but her friend who stayed at the convent has difficulty forgiving Jenny for leaving. The narrator admits that she can accurately be described as “Choosing disappearance, while Helen has chosen the opposite.” Is retreat or escape an ethical choice when problems like climate change need action?

As I read, I found myself identifying with a comment made by the narrator: “It feels always that I am on the edge of some comprehension here but never breaking through to the other side.” I still feel that I’ve missed a lot in this novel, as if I’m the stone yard, arid ground, which has not absorbed much.