Review: Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

Charlotte Woods Booker Prize shortlisted Stone Yard devotional has all the hallmarks of a light novel with an easy-to-follow structure, divided into chapters and parts, along with a narrative voice. However, it is not an easy read and immerses the reader in existentialist contemplation in a way that few other works in contemporary literature have managed (although not for lack of trying). Wood’s unnamed protagonist is a conscientious global citizen, involved in the noble and relevant work of species conservation in Sydney, Australia, when she decides to give up everything, including her marriage, to live surrounded by nuns in a sanctuary nearby her. family home on the plains of New South Wales. What precedes this decision is shown through snapshots from the life of the narrator-protagonist and may resonate with any empathetic reader of English-language literary fiction. It is a familiar yet personal story about the grief of losing a loved one, about past regrets and a certain kind of endless despair that has universal resonance.

The narrator’s choice of self-exile also stems from encountering human apathy in others and in herself in different ways and through different personal experiences. Regarding her decision not to inform her injured loved ones that she is leaving, she says: “You do not announce on Facebook that you, an atheist, are leaving your job, your home and your husband to join a segregated religious community.” . The decision is not motivated by a greater sense of religious awakening or spiritual purpose, but by the urge to devote oneself to the simple matters of everyday life and to live according to an imposed schedule. She chooses to cut herself off from the world she thought she knew and understood, to join a world she thinks she can participate in, even if she doesn’t fully understand it. She notes how she quickly becomes accustomed to this life, to an “incomplete, unhurried emergence of understanding, leaving her 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 regular guests “may be right about the unnaturalness” of their living conditions, but also considers that “there is probably something sickly about the way most people live.” And herein lies the heart of Wood’s project: reflecting the gap between what is actually natural and what is considered natural in the world today.

After the narrator settles into the religious community, the novel begins its development in terms of “three visitations” that continue to haunt the residents of the monastery. One is a mouse plague of biblical proportions (pun intended), one is the arrival of the bones of a deceased sister who was thought to be missing, and the third is the appearance of a nun feared by many for her outspoken activism. The latter especially affects the middle-aged narrator because of their shared childhood past. Throughout the story, the protagonist shares her own experiences witnessing human apathy and participating in morally questionable acts while growing up. This also applies to her own behavior as a child with the newly arrived sister, but also to her experiences with Vietnamese refugees during the war years. As she asks at one point: ‘What does it take to bring reconciliation within yourself? To never be forgiven?”

Although set in Australia and focusing on a group of nuns living on the fringes of society, Stone Yard devotional is actually a chronicle of our world; one trapped in the ongoing climate crisis, an irreversible dependence on late-stage capitalism, and reeling from the aftermath of a global pandemic. Wood’s story, in its own uncanny way, encapsulates all the uncertainty that has come to define the present, in which people “find the idea of ​​ordinary kindness somehow suspect: a mask or a lie.” There is no reprieve from a world order populated by people too busy romanticizing 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 main character says: ‘I was a witness. It was all I could do” and that is exactly what the author wants the reader to achieve with her novel: to witness the uncertain times in which we continue to survive, endlessly distracting ourselves while the world ends, in TS Eliot’s book words : “Not with a bang but with a whimper”.

Simar Bhasin is an independent journalist.