Stone Yard Devotional (2023)

Why this one?

I’m reading all the books on the 2024 Booker Prize Shortlist. With only a couple left, I’m getting on to the ones that I was somewhat less excited by, though that’s not to say I wasn’t intrigued by this one.

Charlotte Wood (1965- ; active 1999- ) was born in Cooma, New South Wales, Australia. She was raised Catholic and her father spent a year in a monastery before marrying her mother. She studied journalism at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, and later completed a PhD at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

She began writing fiction in her twenties, and published her first novel, Pieces of a Girl in 1999. She has since published a total of seven further novels, including The Natural Way of Things (2015) which won numerous awards including the 2016 Stella Prize in Australia. Her novels have been featured on longlists for Australia’s Miles Franklin Award multiple times, beginning with her second novel The Submerged Cathedral (2004) and more recently for The Weekend (2019) and Stone Yard Devotional, which marks her first appearance on a Booker list.

Thoughts, etc.

Stone Yard Devotional begins with its nameless female narrator attending a retreat at a nunnery close to her rural New South Wales childhood hometown. We learn that after several visits, she has decided to live at the nunnery permanently. Ostensibly a reaction to the grief caused by the early death of her mother, her decision to retreat from society seems to be based more broadly on her ‘giving up’ on the modern world and the passions and causes she followed in her previous life( in which she was clearly passionately committed to charity and a degree of activism) in favour of a simpler, quieter life. We learn that in this process she has ended a long-term relationship.

The early parts of the book see the narrator pondering the lives of the nuns from an outsider perspective: she is not especially religious and has not, apparently, come to seek out spiritual enlightenment. She is both intrigued by their rituals and occasionally slightly cynical of their motivations for committing to this life. The book doesn’t really see her develop in this sense either, as she seems to develop a quiet respect for the nuns’ lives and a satisfaction in helping them, but there are no great moments of revelation.

Her attempts to seek out a simpler life are frustrated by a series of issues of (relative) drama that emerge over the course of the book. The bones of a former nun from the monastery who died overseas are brought back to be buried; a childhood acquaintance in whose bullying the narrator was complicit arrives - now a ‘superstar nun’; and the monastery is overrun by a seemingly literal plague of mice.

It’s a quiet novel in general, and despite wrestling with large themes and containing moments of memorable imagery (particularly around those mice and their fate) it is not overly plotted. What we learn about the narrator’s past is in fragments, and threads are raised that generate intrigue but are (deliberately) left unresolved. Much of the conflict is unspoken, or happens ‘off camera’.

Instead the novel is largely interior monologue in which the protagonist wrestles with issues from her past, tries to come to terms with her grief, and aspects of guilt related to her decision to retreat from the world rather than (like some characters in the novel) engage actively with it. It’s set against the backdrop of the Covid-19 Pandemic, but even here that’s largely happening elsewhere, as the narrator and the nuns are already isolating and are therefore relatively unimpacted by restrictions (aside from them playing a role in various delays in comings and goings).

This was a beautifully written book, characterised by the sort of minimal, understand prose that I always absolutely love. Its themes are thought-provoking and tackling in a thoughtful, nuanced manner, with no sense of judgement. Its narrator is compelling, with enough mystery throughout to keep us interested, as well as a voice that alternates between compassion and a refreshingly honest cynicism. If it perhaps lacks a little in the way of driving action, that is perhaps part of the point - this is a book, like its narrator, that has chosen the path of quiet contemplation.

Score

7.5

It’s another strong entry in this year’s shortlist, and one that I think a lot of people will really find a deep connection with. I didn’t quite click with it in that same way, despite very much enjoying it for what it was. For me, there are more exciting books on this year’s shortlist, but this one still very much deserves its place.

Next up

One to go, and it’s the one I was most wary of: Anne Michaels’ Held.