Stone Yard Devotional was a finalist for the Booker Prize last year. The jury described it as “a quiet novel of intense power which thrilled and chilled them.” The narrator is a woman without a name. She is a middle-aged academic who abruptly leaves her partner, her job as an environmental activist and her friends to join a Catholic religious community in Australia.
This is a very simple setting. She is everywoman, grappling with all the duties and silences of a residence of retreat. She has come to simplify and distill by cooking, cleaning, gardening, taking care of animals, praying (although she is not a believer). She has lost hope in the ability of humans to sustain the health of the planet and needs a disruption.
The novel has certainly made me reflect. Take for example the act of praying. The narrator had always felt it was a waste of time. I was of the same opinion. But through her time at the retreat, she comes to understand praying can also mean taking your attention to the highest degree – a way to interrupt your own habitual thinking. This is certainly something that could benefit everyone in these times of distraction and disarray.
As a lapsed Catholic, I found her relations with the nuns threw me back into my own childhood when my interactions with nuns were, shall we say, not altogether positive. Mother Consolata was born again in my mind. I could never understand how a nun could be so cold and yet supposedly carry the grace of God. In this book, the nuns who go about their day are just human with obsessions and opinions that fuel their life, just like the rest of us poor souls!
Moral decisions need to be made continually, even in a place that lives lightly on the earth and has few involved characters. One that almost sank them was the plague of mice. As a group, they found killing animals abhorrent. But the mice were everywhere, literally eating everything, from food to plastic, to insulation and crawling in their beds every night. How to kill them? Poisoning was the easiest, but other animals and birds would die from eating poisoned mice. They resorted to trapping which carried the big penance of having to remove dead bodies from the traps and then burying them.
There is a subplot that runs along with the community’s struggle to cope with their life in nature. An environmental activist is to accompany the bones of a missing nun who is to be buried at the retreat. The activist went to school with the narrator and their entanglement opens up the raw and difficult journey of getting to adulthood.
After I finished The Stoneyard Devotional I googled plague of mice in Australia. So many reports and videos of this frightening and gory time popped up. Charlotte Wood knows how to trap mice because, as in all the details of this entrancing and yes, chilling novel, she has been there.