Review: Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
Though set in Australia and centred on a group of nuns living on the edge of society, Stone Yard Devotional is actually a chronicle of our world irreversibly dependent on late-stage capitalism, caught in the climate crisis, and reeling from the aftermath of a global pandemic
Charlotte Wood’s Booker Prize shortlisted Stone Yard Devotional has all the trappings of a breezy novel with an easy-to-follow structure divided into chapters and parts along with a conversational narrative voice. However, it is not an easy read and plunges the reader into existentialist contemplation in a way that few other works in contemporary literature have managed to do (though not for lack of trying). Wood’s unnamed protagonist is a conscientious citizen of the world, engaged in the noble and relevant work of species conservation in Sydney, Australia, when she decides to give it all up, including her marriage, to live surrounded by nuns in a retreat close to her childhood home on the New South Wales plains. What precedes this decision is shown through snapshots of the narrator-protagonist’s life and will possibly resonate with every empathetic reader of Anglophone literary fiction. It is a familiar yet personal tale of the grief of losing a loved one, of past regrets and a particular kind of unending despair that has universal resonance.
The narrator’s choice of self exile also comes from encountering, in different ways and through different personal experiences, human apathy in others and in herself. About her decision to not inform her wounded loved ones that she is leaving, she states: “You do not announce on Facebook that you, an atheist, are leaving your job and your home and your husband to join a cloistered religious community”. The decision is not motivated by a larger sense of religious awakening or spiritual purpose but by the urge to devote herself to the simple mundanities of the everyday and to live according to an imposed schedule. She chooses to switch off from the world she thought she knew and understood to join one which she believes she can participate in even though she doesn’t fully understand it. She notes how accustomed she soon becomes to this life, to an “incomplete, unhurried emergence of understanding, sitting with questions that are sometimes never answered.” She is aware of how the outside world views this choice. She notes that the wife of one of their regulars “may be right about the unnaturalness” of their living conditions but also reflects that “there’s probably something sick about the way most people live”. And herein lies the crux of Wood’s project: to mirror the gap between what is actually natural and what has come to be considered as natural in the world today.
After the narrator settles down in the religious community, the novel begins its development in terms of “three visitations” that come to haunt the convent’s inhabitants. One is a mice infestation of biblical proportions (pun intended), another is the arrival of the bones of a departed sister who was thought to be missing, and the third is the appearance of a nun feared by many for her outspoken activism. The last one particularly affects the middle-aged narrator because of their shared childhood past. Throughout, the protagonist shares her own experiences of witnessing human apathy as well as taking part in morally questionable acts while growing up. This includes her own behaviour as a child with the newly arrived sister as well as her experience with Vietnamese refugees during the war years. As she asks at one point, “What does it take, to atone, inside yourself? To never be forgiven?”
Though set in Australia and centred on a group of nuns living on the edge of society, Stone Yard Devotional is actually a chronicle of our world; one caught in the ongoing climate crisis, an irreversible dependence on late-stage capitalism, and reeling from the aftermath of a global pandemic. Wood’s narrative encompasses, in its own eerie manner, all the precariousness that has come to define the present where people “find the idea of habitual kindness to be somehow suspect: a mask or a lie”. There is no respite from a world order populated by human beings too busy romanticising their lives on social media platforms.
This is a collection of moments of personal grief and guilt interspersed with a universal meditation on the human condition. At one point, the protagonist states, “I stood in witness. It was all I could do” and that is exactly what the reader feels the author has set out to do through her novel: bear witness to the uncertain times in which we continue to exist, distracting ourselves endlessly as the world ends, in TS Eliot’s words, “Not with a bang but a whimper”.
Simar Bhasin is an independent journalist.