Book Review: ‘Stone Yard Devotional,’ by Charlotte Wood

STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL, by Charlotte Wood

The mice are everywhere. Rooting through the chicken feed and the lettuce bed and the compost bucket; running up bedposts and bare legs; spewing from cars and church organs; waves of small bodies scurrying across paved roads like “a wide river of silver water.” Where there aren’t mice, there are their effects: electrical cords and bags of flour torn apart; magpies dead after eating the poisoned carcasses; a nest inside an old piano, woven from pieces of felt chewed off its hammers. The sounds of their scratching in the walls “like dried leaves falling.”

It has a ring of magical realism to it, but the rodent infestation in Charlotte Wood’s somber, exquisite seventh novel, “Stone Yard Devotional,” is nonfiction. In 2021, as the world faced the Covid pandemic, eastern Australia was contending with an additional contagion — a great surplus of mice ravaging crops and communities alike, thanks to heavier-than-normal rains and warmer temperatures that pushed the crisis further and further south.

That crisis is just one of three “visitants” to arrive on the doorstep of Wood’s unnamed narrator, an atheist in her 60s who has left behind her husband and her career as a wildlife conservationist in Sydney to live in a convent near her rural hometown in New South Wales. The second is a casket carrying the bones of Sister Jenny, a nun who disappeared 20 years earlier, after abandoning the convent to run a women’s shelter in Bangkok. The third, a childhood classmate named Helen Parry, whom the narrator once bullied, has since become a nun herself, though of the celebrity-activist kind the other nuns don’t trust.

Any one of these arrivals on its own would be enough to puncture the fantasy of “escape” the narrator seeks among this sisterhood, but together their confluence descends on the novel with the force of a biblical flood.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year (the novel was published in 2023 in Australia and England), “Stone Yard Devotional” is the diary of a person with more days behind her than ahead, tired of trying and failing to rescue the planet from man-made destruction, wanting to make her way home. Apocalypse is not so much the plot of the book as its anchor, grounding the novel’s ruminations on forgiveness and regret, on how to live and die, if not virtuously, then as harmlessly as possible.

The novel is, in many ways, an extended meditative vigil. At the convent, in place of noise and action there is what the nuns call prayer, and the narrator simply calls thinking. Short chapters often begin in the present and then digress into episodes from the narrator’s mostly stable, untroubled past. Here is her mother composting before it was cool and visiting with a blind woman in her trailer for hours at a time. Here is the narrator in a high school sewing class, ganging up on the “friendless” Helen Parry while knowing the girl is being ritually abused and abandoned by her poor, single mother. These memories appear and recede as fluidly as human thoughts, without reason or chronology or obvious connection to what’s happening outside her head (mostly emptying mouse traps, taking meals, spats between sisters, chasing government permissions to bury Sister Jenny’s remains).

A part but not one of them, the narrator witnesses the nuns’ rituals, the circadian rhythms of the liturgy, with the receptive curiosity of the hypnotized, or the converted. “But how do they get anything done?” she thinks, Wood’s sedate, unpretentious prose bending sparingly, invitingly, into the outsider’s wry humor. “All these interruptions day in, day out, having to drop what you’re doing and toddle into church every couple of hours. Then I realized: It’s not an interruption to the work; it is the work. This is the doing.”

Distance from the world is no antidote to the narrator’s despair; it merely gives her room to acknowledge it. She’s forlorn about her parents’ deaths more than 30 years ago; about her dissolving marriage; about her increasing disillusionment with her Threatened Species Rescue Center. “At every step of my every attempt I have only worsened the destruction,” she decides. “Every email, meeting, press release, conference, protest. Every minuscule action after waking means slurping up resources, expelling waste, destroying habitat. … Whereas staying still, suspended in time like these women, does the opposite. They are doing no harm.”

Well, except for the nun wielding a leaf blower outside her window; or the “morally appalling” task of drowning mice in buckets of water; or the racist hatred she feels emanating from a particularly dogmatic nun. Except for the Aboriginal cultures displaced and the mass graves around the world that spring to her mind when she buries a chick found dead from frost. “I thought of those babies and those poor girls, and the savagery of the Catholic Church came flooding in once again. Yet here I am. Wrestle, wrestle.”

The wrestling in this novel is with the nature and meaning of penance, atonement. Upon learning that Helen will be the one to transport Sister Jenny’s bones back to Australia, the narrator recalls their last encounter, decades ago, at a protest against logging. It’s an excruciating scene of absolution sought and denied, of quiet humiliation: “I told her that I was to this day ashamed of what we had done, and that I was deeply sorry for my part in it,” she says, but it takes Helen a minute to even remember her. “I can see why that might have been a big … incident … for you,” she finally replies, as intimidatingly self-assured now as she was as a child. “But for me, that day was nothing.”

Activism, abdication, atonement, grace: In this novel no one of these paths is holier than another; Wood is more invested in noticing the human pursuit of holiness itself. “Not denounced, not forgiven,” the narrator and her sins swing in the uncomfortable uncertainty of the living. Nothing can exempt a person from this moral stain, from mortality — not even being a nun on the edge of the earth.

STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL | By Charlotte Wood | Riverhead | 295 pp. | $28