Fiction – paperback; Allen & Unwin; 320 pages; 2023.
Stone Yard Devotional, by Charlotte Wood, is a gentle, deeply contemplative novel but it’s not about gentle things. It’s a chronicle of slights and the wrongs we do other people, and asks how do we atone and rectify our wrongdoings?
Seeking solitude
The story takes the form of a diary written by an unnamed woman on a “retreat” — from her marriage, from her city life working for a threatened species charity, from the noise, clutter and busyness of 21st-century living.
She’s staying in the guest “cabin” attached to a cloistered religious community. The small community of nuns, together with two or three other guests, live on the plains of Monaro, in rural NSW, where the narrator grew up.
The rhythms and rituals of this way of life provide structure to her days, as well as a kind of comfort. The outside world is dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, but here the seclusion acts as a safe “bubble”.
In the church, a great restfulness comes over me. I try to think critically about what’s happening but I’m drenched in a weird tranquility so deep it puts a stop to thought. Is it to do with being completely passive, yet still somehow participant? Or perhaps it’s simply owed to being somewhere so quiet; a place entirely dedicated to silence. In the contemporary world, this kind of stillness feels radical. Illicit. (p15)
There’s no real plot; the story simply charts the narrator’s experience living this new way of life, where the most stressful thing is battling a mouse plague (warning: some of the scenes involving mice are gruesome) and trying to wean the nuns off prepackaged foods.
Paying penance
Interestingly, she hasn’t been called to the monastery by religion — she’s an avowed atheist — but by a need to escape the trappings of modern life and “to find a place I had never been but which was still, in some undeniable way, my home”. Scratch deeper and that need is really to pay penance for past wrongs by giving something back, to serve others in a way that her late mother served others.
Indeed, it’s the ghost of her mother that haunts the pages of this novel. She’s there in the narrator’s thoughts and memories like a living presence. And because she thinks about her mother so much, her thoughts naturally turn to her childhood — her rural upbringing, her family life and school, and things she would rather forget but hasn’t.
These recollections take on a greater meaning when Helen Parry, a girl she went to school with and treated unkindly, arrives at the monastery. Helen is now a kind of celebrity nun and an activist and is a stark reminder that our narrator can never quite escape her past.
Deeply reflective
Stone Yard Devotional is a quiet, introspective novel, one that is as much about the past as it is about the present.
Admittedly, when I began it I wondered where the narrative was heading and what the whole point of the story was about.
It feels like a memoir given all the anecdotes and recollections of childhood guilt and parental influences, coupled with diary entries that come right out of the Helen Garner school of observational writing. But I soon became hypnotised by the meditative prose and the clear-eyed self-analysis that pulls no punches.
It’s a tale about being human and overcoming troubling emotions — grief, despair and guilt — so that we can heal, regain a sense of peace and move forward in life.
I really enjoyed it and thought it most closely resembled Wood’s 2004 novel, The Submerged Cathedral, which I now believe was based on her mother’s life.
Stone Yard Devotional will be published in hardback in the UK on 7 March; the Kindle edition is already available.
Lisa at ANZLitLovers has also reviewed this one.
Book launch in Fremantle
As reported via my Instagram account, in November Charlotte Wood was in Fremantle to launch the book.
In a great conversation moderated by local journalist Gillian O’Shaughnessy, she talked about the meditative quality of the work, her love of the Monaro plains where the story is set and a little about her mother, whom the mother in this book is based on.
Reading Matters 
I’ve just started reading this. I love the fact that her books are all so different (in terms of topic) and yet there is a reliable quality to her writing that carries through. I was so disappointed to miss the Melbourne launch of this book – have heard her speak before and it has always added additional insight into her work (particularly memorable were the launches of The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend – she let people ‘stay back’ to discuss the ending of TNWOT!).
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You’re right… each book is quite different, which is probably why I have so much respect for what she does. It’s risky to change tack but you don’t really grow as a writer if you don’t.
I bet that conversation about the TNWOT ending was very interesting 💥😆
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*Definitely* want to read this!
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Not long to wait until it’s released there.
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I’m really interested to read this, and see it’s on order at the library. I’m in the queue (probably first).
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Your library is very clued up!
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It is. We’re really fortunate. Even in these straitened times, it continues to buy, and sometimes from independent publishers too.
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This is the third review I have read of this book, and it was on THE list, but due to the mice comment, it’s removed. Thanks. I can take crime books, but when it’s animals…. no.
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The mice plague in this story is based on a real mice plague that happened in NSW in 2021 (though not necessarily on the Monaro plains). It’s in the book as a kind of metaphor for the narrator’s inability to control every facet of her life. It also reflects the minor theme of climate change that runs throughout and calls into question what do we do about protecting precious food sources in time of crisis. So it’s not gratuitous, it just reflects reality for so much of rural Australia. (There have been so many mice plagues in Australia, it warrants its own Wikipedia entry.)
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I understand, but still…
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I second what Kate says about how versatile CW is, and I just re-read your review of The Submerged Cathedral which confirms it.
BTW There is a link in that review about a review of Sixty Lights on your old Typepad blog, have you still got that somewhere? I am making a belated effort to catch up with Gail Jones and I remember vaguely reading that one and would love to see your thoughts on it.
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She *is* versatile and a deep thinker. At the launch I felt she sometimes struggled to articulate her thoughts and suspect she’s better with the pen than the spoken word.
The old Typedpad blog got killed off a decade ago, but all reviews were imported to this blog. All my reviews of Gail Jones’ work are here: https://readingmattersblog.com/category/author/gail-jones-author-name/
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Oh excellent, I should have looked for myself!
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I didn’t think this book was for me, but your review has now made me think otherwise. I’m a country girl who has lived through several mice plagues; they are traumatic times for all species involved!
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Just fished this comment out of spam… I don’t normally check, but glad I did! I think this book is probably an antidote to the Natural Way of Things, responding to all that anger in TNWOT with something a bit more meditative and gentle. It’s quite an effortless almost hypnotic read and if you grew up in the country and went to the local high school (as I did) there will be a lot that resonates.
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Ahhh as did I too – thanks for fishing me out of the spam folder.
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I’m going to read this later, but I’ve read the last paragraph, and I’m expecting when I read it (with my reading group in the next few months) to love the Monaro setting as I love them too, and manage to drive through them or parts of them a few times each year.
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Your book group will no doubt love the setting. It’s a good choice for a book group too because there’s a lot to discuss in it.
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We did The natural way of things of hers which was pretty controversial, and The weekend which most liked. I’m guessing given its location and topic that this will be liked too.
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I was so impressed by TNWoT and so disappointed by The Weekend that I’m not sure I want to read any more Wood. Still, I hear what you say, and if my library gets the audiobook I’ll probably pick it up (audiobook stocks seem to change very, very slowly).
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It ain’t nothing like either of those two books, but probably closer in tone to The Weekend than TNWOT.
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Another writer I really should have tried by now (I actually thought I might have had an old review copy of hers around, but I must have passed it on to the op shop…).
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I’ve read and reviewed her entire backlist and they’re all excellent but quite different in tone, style, mood and subject matter.
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