A surprise inclusion on the Booker Prize shortlist – at least as far as the bookies were concerned – Charlotte Wood is the first Australian author to be shortlisted since Richard Flanagan won in 2014. In Stone Yard Devotional, Wood’s seventh novel and the third to be published outside Australia, a woman leaves her marriage and job in Sydney to live in a monastery near her hometown. An atheist, her impetus to retreat is not religious fervour but despair about the futility of her work with endangered species.
In addition to climate concerns, the book takes up themes of grief and forgiveness. In what Wood has called her most personal book to date, she places the Catholic monastery in New South Wales, where she grew up. “Place names I thought I’d forgotten returned to me one by one,” the nameless narrator writes, ”…like beads on a rosary.” En route to the abbey, the narrator, who lost both parents young, visits their graves for the first time in 35 years. “My inability to get over my parents’ deaths has been a source of lifelong shame to me,” she shares, reflecting on “the fact of grief quietly making itself known, again and again”.
Written in the form of diaristic reflections, including flashbacks, Stone Yard Devotional is a quieter book than its two predecessors. The Stella Prize-winning The Natural Way of Things (2015) – a #MeToo book avant la lettre – is a dystopian story in which 10 young women involved in sex scandals with powerful men are held prisoner in the outback. The Weekend (2019), about three septuagenarians brought together by a friend’s death, had plot twists ramping up at the end. Wood has attributed the paring down of her prose to the “compelled stillness” of Covid lockdowns as she wrote Stone Yard Devotional, followed by a cancer diagnosis. These “twin upheavals” gave her “an urgent instinct to shed anything inessential in [her] work”, she has said.
The novel’s plot, such as it is, concerns the daily routine of the nuns being disrupted by three “visitations”. A drought in the north has led to a plague of mice, now spreading to their region. (Gruesomely, some of Wood’s vivid imagery of the infestation, including mouse cannibalism, is based on actual events of 2021.) Meanwhile, the bones of Sister Jenny, one of their own who disappeared in Thailand in the 1990s, have washed up in a flood and are being repatriated for burial. Jenny had left the convent “against advice” to set up a shelter for abused women and was presumed murdered by a priest. The third visitation is the arrival of a celebrity activist nun, Helen Parry, who brings Sister Jenny’s remains from Bangkok. Bullied in high school as a classmate of the narrator’s, Parry refuses to engage with her remorse.
The prose of Stone Yard Devotional – which Wood intended to be “bone-bare” – mirrors the remote landscape of the “high, dry Monaro plains” in which it is set. One of the nuns dismisses the narrator’s perception of prayer as “this telephone line to God bullshit”. Instead, praying is “a way to interrupt your own habitual thinking”, she explains. “It’s not chitchat; it’s hard labour.” Although the narrator’s devotion isn’t to God, the “devotional” of the title suggests spiritual growth thanks to her cultivation of attention, which “taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer”, as Simone Weil had it.
Although raised Catholic, crediting the boredom of church services for developing her imagination, “I would turn to art over a church any day,” Wood has said. She refers to her “devotion” to her compatriot Helen Garner, for example, whose 1985 short-story collection, Postcards from Surfers, Wood says inspired her to become a writer. With language less lapidary than those of her fellow shortlisted author Samantha Harvey or Claire Keegan, the simplicity of the sentences in Stone Yard Devotional brings to mind an unpolished stone.
With cli-fi usually imagining dystopian scenarios, Wood’s novel focuses on more ordinary existential grappling, including the ethics of retreating versus action as an antidote to despair. Sister Jenny’s bones are finally laid to rest in a paddock called Stone Yard. As the nuns get mired in bureaucracy trying to get clearance for the burial, it’s Parry who breaks “through the despair of inaction by showing us we could give permission to ourselves”.
Stone Yard Devotional offers the space to dwell in questions. The famous Julian of Norwich quotation –”all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” – hangs in the hallway of the abbey. One day during Vigils, the narrator is “flooded once again with the knowledge that nothing outside these abbey walls is well, and no manner of things shall be well … And I don’t know what my duty is to that knowledge,” she admits, “except to hold it”.
Mia Levitin is a critic
