Short-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize, Australian novelist Charlotte Wood’s “Stone Yard Devotional” is an absorbing and contemplative story of grief and the desire for forgiveness for one’s failures, particularly when forgiveness may not be possible or deserved.
Wood’s unnamed protagonist is a middle-aged woman who abruptly walks away from her marriage and high-powered career as a climate activist to join a cloistered religious community on the outskirts of her hometown in southern Australia.
Though she is not seeking religion per se, she is drawn to the sisters’ quiet disciplines as an antidote to the desperation of her quest to save the world from disaster through professional activism. She also hopes to find an answer to the question that absorbs many of us as we age and grieve parents and confront our own mortality: what is truly worth doing with our limited time?
Instead of simple answers and escape from the troubles of life, however, she finds herself constantly reminded of her grief for her mother and increasingly unnerved by the community’s plague of mice — ironically influenced by climate change.
The community’s mundane routines are also disrupted by the return of the remains of a member of their order who had been murdered years before in Thailand — and whose body was only recently discovered. Along with these repatriated bones comes a visitor with an unexpected connection to the protagonist’s past, who will force her to exhume some of her most deeply buried regrets.
Aside from the onslaught of the mice, who build their pungent nests in the piano and gnaw reliably through anything but metal or glass, the novel’s tensions are largely internal, yet the plot is satisfyingly layered and well-paced. Though the protagonist is accepted as part of the community and has roots in the nearby town where she attended a Catholic school, she remains in some ways an outsider as she does not join the order herself. This seemingly-slight-yet-significant distance makes her perspective more accessible to secular readers who may likewise struggle to fully understand the sisters’ lifestyle and devotion even as they might be curious about it.
“Stone Yard Devotional” is Charlotte Wood’s seventh novel, and fans of her work will find that its style falls somewhere between the haunting dystopic fable of her fifth, “The Natural Way of Things,” and the warmer, more conventional narrative approach of her sixth, “The Weekend,” about several older women gathering to clean out the vacation home of their recently deceased friend.
Written in the form of journal entries, the book’s often short chapters tend toward observation and anecdote, calling to mind Marilynne Robinson’s critically acclaimed epistolary novel, “Gilead.”
The prose is consistently spare yet lyrical, often philosophical and confessional in nature, and sprinkled with self-deprecating wit. A scene that begins with the discovery of a dead baby chick makes its way to the protagonist’s reflections on “the mass graves in which nuns (Irish, American, Canadian, why not also Australian?) had buried babies they called illegitimate” and her own complicated feelings about the Church. “Yet here I am,” she admits with a note of irony. “Wrestle, wrestle.”
At one point, Wood’s protagonist reflects: “I used to think there was a ‘before’ and ‘after’ most things that happen to a person; that a fence of time and space could separate even quite catastrophic experience from the ordinary whole of life. But now I know that with a great devastation of some kind, there is no before or after. Even when the commotion of crisis has settled, it’s still there, like that dam water, insisting, seeping, across the past and the future.”
“Stone Yard Devotional” will appeal to readers who resonate with this sentiment; it’s a beautifully observed study of the pressures and leaks of such metaphorical dam water as it bears down on one woman’s ordinary yet profound life.
Jules Fitz Gerald is a writer originally from Pittsburgh. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, A Public Space, The Common, Salamander, and elsewhere, and her criticism can also be found at Chicago Review of Books, The Rumpus, and The Hopkins Review.
First Published: February 16, 2025, 10:30 a.m.
