Sometimes a book comes to you at exactly the right time. Stone Yard Devotional (Allen and Unwin 2023) by award-winning author Charlotte Wood was for me a profound and affecting story that I didn’t know I needed, at a difficult time. Meditative, sharply observed, wise and compelling, Stone Yard Devotional manages the peace and allegory of writers such as Amanda Lohrey and Tegan Bennet Daylight, with the crisp, perceptive and often witty scene structure of Helen Garner. In addition to this very literary style, the narrative pulls the reader along in a strong grip, with several engaging plot lines that are subtle but captivating. This is a gentle and meaningful story written by an author in complete control of her writing capabilities; a writer who knows when to pull back and when to push, when to say less, what to leave to the reader to interpret and how much to say about what.
The novel is set in a small religious community and is narrated by a woman who has abandoned her city life and her marriage, returned to her childhood town and almost accidentally on purpose, mysteriously and seamlessly begins living with the nuns and following their simple and monastic lifestyle. She doesn’t know if she believes in God or prayer, yet she is drawn into the compulsive, almost powerful, rhythm of the days at the isolated retreat, and while days become weeks become months, she does a lot of thinking, especially about her long-dead mother and their relationship.
There are several main mysteries running through the novel. A mouse infestation tries the patience of the women living together as they battle the plague-like religious numbers of vermin with whatever they can invent or imagine to protect their stores and belongings and the very houses themselves from being overrun or eaten. Then news arrives that the bones of a nun missing from the community since she volunteered decades before in Thailand have been discovered, identified and are being returned to be buried in consecrated ground. The women remember her, and the puzzle of her death awakes a further grieving. The third plot point relates to a woman from the narrator’s past who visits the community, igniting disturbing memories and strange recollections about her childhood relationships.
These three narratives weave in and out to produce a rich tapestry of belonging, memory, yearning, frustration, friendship, mourning, reflection, loss and the intimacies of relationships. Our narrator seeks a sense of peace throughout the novel, but this comes and goes, or sometimes remains annoyingly out of reach. It leads her to ask herself (and others) some of the bigger questions in life about forgiveness, loyalty, need, hope, grief, failure, moral ambiguity and ethical problems.
Although the book is divided into chapters, the entire novel is comprised of small vignettes or tiny scenes sometimes only a sentence or two long. In this way, Wood allows us inside the head of the narrator, as she naturally thinks of one thing and then another, as her thoughts wander from the ethereal to the prosaic, from dreamlike states to pragmatic purpose.
Charlotte Wood is a truly divine writer and this book and its meditative and almost religious rhythms and themes came to me at a time of loss in my own life, providing a soothing panacea, a gentle and restful voice, a wonderment and joy, a questioning curiosity that helped to heal my soul. I highly recommend this beautiful book.