A woman abandons her city life and marriage to return to the place of her childhood, holing up in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Monaro. She does not believe in God, doesn’t know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive life almost by accident. As she gradually adjusts to the rhythms of monastic life, she finds herself turning again and again to thoughts of her mother, whose early death she can’t forget.
Disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signalling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who left the community decades before to minister to deprived women in Thailand – then disappeared, presumed murdered. Finally, a troubling visitor to the monastery pulls the narrator further back into her past.With each of these disturbing arrivals, the woman faces some deep questions. Can a person be truly good? What is forgiveness? Is loss of hope a moral failure? And can the business of grief ever really be finished?
Source: Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
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I had not read any of Charlotte Wood’s work, but was inspired by The Minefield podcast.
Stone Yard Devotional is situated in the world, set in an enclosed religious community in the Monaro plain in regional New South Wales, capturing elements of climate change with the mouse plague, while also still living through the coronavirus pandemic. However, this helps to touch on the ageless elements of the story that encourage introspection, from despair, shame, grief and legacy.
Contemporary issues – climate change and a global pandemic – can sometimes appear as flat concepts or stale ideas in fiction, but Stone Yard Devotional is able to make both topics locally and vividly felt as haunting human stories.
Source: Charlotte Wood
It was a strange book that had me thinking about those choices at schools that did not age well. I think that Shady Cosgrove captures it best in suggesting that it is a ‘novel of questions’:
This is a novel of questions. How does the past ripple into the present? How do we live with our past actions? What is the nature of forgiveness? What is the nature of religious belief? How might we understand experiences of the spiritual?
I think, ultimately, it’s a story of memory and sacrifice. It asks what we do and don’t remember of our pasts. And it asks: what are we willing to give up in the name of our life’s purpose?
Source: Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional poses big questions about goodness, purpose and sacrifice by Shady Cosgrove
For a book often sparse with action (other than the mice), I feel that it will be one of those books that will sit with me for quite awhile. I wonder if there is something about space of the landscape, the slowness of living, that is what invites us in?