The wretched of the earth in Charlotte Wood’s novel ‘Stone Yard Devotional’

The first sign that the Earth is trying to warn you of impending doom is that animals are behaving unnaturally. They flee their habitats, exchange their silence for desperate sounds and even commit mass suicide when the end is near and inevitable. When mice are found dead in the religious retreat where the unnamed protagonist checks herself into Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard devotionalher initial disgust and reluctance to clean up the mess is replaced by a mechanical routine of disposing of the bodies before the stench becomes even more unbearable. In this sickening exercise, the main character finds rats cannibalizing their relatives, feeding on dead birds and causing general mayhem. The earth is inverting itself by throwing up its most unwanted pests.

The arrival

A middle-aged woman, at the end of her marriage and career, drives to a desolate landscape in Australia and stays in a Christian retreat to reconsider her life and the difficult deaths of her parents. At first she abstains from social contact – she eats herself, lies flat on the ground for lack of anything better to do – but slowly becomes involved in daily life in the monastery. This includes cleaning, cooking, washing. The women – nuns – do not offer any holy escape. They do chores all day as you would do at home. There are rare references to the lord and his miracles, and no transformations or deliverances.

The women – all close together – behave more like young, hot-blooded girls than serene, enlightened nuns. Jealousy abounds, there are hierarchies, cliques are formed. Some are suspicious of the others. It’s like a monastery school hostel rather than a real monastery.

The narrator knows the circumstances that brought her here: the absolute grief of losing her parents. The mundanity of life here is juxtaposed with her memories of them. She remembers how her mother seemed to live a secret life in which no one knew of her pain, while her father lived a practical life in which he practiced kindness with almost a conscious, laughable effort. She remembers the first groups of Vietnamese refugees who arrived on the shores of her Australian town, the pair of orphans they took in, and her parents’ Christian commitment to serving the refugees, which was still somewhat racist despite noble intentions. The earth where she buries the dead mice, along with the other animals they killed, brings back memories of her mother tending her garden and feeding the soil with manure and compost. The Vietnamese orphans were terrified of the vast, arid Australian expanse, fearing the earth hid landmines. On the same soil, her mother grew fruits and vegetables that fed the family. Through her mother, the narrator repeats the Christian belief that “to dust you will return.” The cycle of life – birth, nourishment, death and decay – takes place in the earth.

But death is not always kind and helpful. A flash flood in Thailand washes away the bones of Sister Jenny, a member of the monastery who was murdered in Thailand many years ago. Her best friend here feels possessive over the remains, but a proper burial will be overseen by Helen Parry, a ‘famous nun’ and a climate activist. The narrator remembers Parry as a child who was bullied at school, but now there is nothing left of her old self. She is confident in her demeanor, is a bit of a bully to the nuns who live there, and walks around the convent with complete authority. The arrival of this guest – a visit – disrupts the established order. Perry brings confirmation that things are changing. Fast and for the worse. The climate news on the radio and the higher frequency on which the dead mice appear herald the beginning of the end.

Waiting for departure

Yet the overwhelming presence of death around her does not convert the narrator. She remains an atheist, but is committed to the monastery more out of the need to be useful than out of Christian devotion. She resigns herself to the dead mice and the wilting vegetation, the insects that fly in and the birds that drop dead. In a moment of desperation she turns to the monastery and now it seems to surround her. She reminds herself that for Catholics, despair is the “ultimate sin” and that the only way to stay afloat is to keep your eyes and mind focused on the present and get on with your day. As the mouse plague becomes more severe and the earth begins to feel stranger, the narrator and the nuns can do nothing but clean up with extra precision every day. An endless, useless pretense of normality.

The novel therefore also asks what an end-time ‘withdrawal’ means – how does one seek shelter when the world is collapsing in on itself with such catastrophic ultimateity? Especially when the perpetrators of this violence – we humans – long to return to the earth after centuries of thoughtlessly and violently ravaging it? Maybe we pray for a painless salvation, maybe we crucify ourselves for our sins, maybe we banish ourselves to purgatory, where there is no escape. There are no easy answers.

The climate catastrophe, the refugee crisis, poverty and hunger are our collective fate. Like the residents of the monastery, we too fluctuate between moments of immobilizing fear and efficient productivity. Life happens somewhere between these two extremes. Our routines and chores are filled with memories and prayers – our personal contemplation of what the earth is becoming and what we are becoming along with it. Stone Yard devotional This novel connects these seemingly disjointed examples of despair and desire, and our willingness – or unwillingness – to accept the storm toward a Biblical ending.

Stone Yard devotionalCharlotte Wood, Sceptre/Hachette UK.