Charlotte Wood
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood is a quiet novel in which very little happens. Set in Australia, it unfolds in the first-person voice of a middle-aged woman who leaves her marriage and career as a species conservationist to live in a convent where she prepares food, cleans, and occasionally attends mass. She is not religious and has not experienced a religious conversion. Her decision to live in the convent is simple enough: she wants to escape life and lead a quiet existence punctuated by regular routines.
The novel proceeds at a slow, leisurely pace. The narrator’s quiet, meditative life is interrupted by three events: a horrendous plague of mice; the return to the convent of the skeletal remains of a murdered nun; and the reappearance of a childhood figure from her school days for whom the narrator harbors guilt for her participation in taunting and bullying the girl.
The narrator’s interiority includes flashbacks from her life; her assessment of her relationship with her mother; her mother’s death; her thoughts on guilt, forgiveness, redemption, and death. Her interiority is frequently interrupted by graphic details of the mice infestation. Mice show up everywhere: inside shoes, beds, pantry, hallways, and rooms. They can be heard scuttling under floorboards and in walls. They leave traces of their ubiquitous presence everywhere. Traps are set and mice carcasses are tossed into a ditch for burial. This plague of rodents is described in vivid, gruesome details.
The return of the nun’s skeletal remains and the delay in obtaining permission for her burial sets the narrator on a course of contemplating death and the meaning of sacrifice. The visit from her former school mate triggers feelings of guilt as well as an interrogation of political activism, grief, penance, atonement, and redemption.
The novel is restrained and meditative. The narrator has escaped from the world in a state of despondency. Withdrawn from the outside world, she explores her interiority, interaction with others, and with the factors which keep intruding in her seclusion. Although very little happens in terms of plot, and although it doesn’t offer any answers to some of life’s enduring questions, the novel leaves a strong, lingering impact after the final pages have been read.