She goes first as a guest, just for five days, seeking respite from unresolved grief after her parents’ deaths. The place she has chosen is the home of a small order of nuns near the remote Australian town where she grew up, on the unforgiving rocky plains of the Monaro in New South Wales. The food is terrible, the round of religious observance bemusing and alienating, but something calls to her, and she returns for good, leaving behind, without explanation, her partner, her job, her friends. She is an atheist; the workings of prayer are unfathomable. Yet she stays. And we never learn her name.
Because Charlotte Wood is such a fine writer, it would be enough just to follow the thoughts of this troubled anonymous woman and the strange, quiet existence she has come to. The gradual accretion of background, the apparently unrelated digressions, the childhood memories – all are stitched together with understated and compelling brilliance. Wood is pitch perfect on the small moments of a confined life – the quotidian irritations, the peccadilloes, the inevitable personality clashes. And all is not unrelieved seriousness. There is a good measure of dry, and wry, humour. The narrator orders herself not to be annoyed by the constant sneezing of the sister afflicted with hayfever, but finds it hard to tolerate the “full-body convulsions … the dramatic pause … before another round of swooping, high-performance noise”.
But outside events intrude. First, and most horribly, is a biblical plague of mice (a real 2020-21 event). Although she is never sensationalist, Wood spares no detail here. The constantly moving tide of tiny rodents infiltrates every imaginable, and unimaginable, part of the women’s lives. The creatures not only eat and contaminate food but hide inside shoes, skitter across sleeping faces, cling to screen doors, appear in shower cubicles. They become cannibals. Their poisoned bodies kill the birds who consume them.
“The bones and Helen Parry are on their way here.” This sentence encapsulates the other two visitations that challenge and disturb the narrator’s world and that of her companions. The bones, returning home after much bureaucratic delay, are those of Sister Jenny, who many years before left the order to work in Thailand and was never seen again. Finally, the discovery of her skeletal remains, identified by a cross and DNA, proved she had been killed. And accompanying the bones is a woman, now a nun, well known to the narrator. Parry, a former schoolmate, was always the outcast, a “loud, unruly girl, repellent to all” but who, in the face of constant taunting and teacher punishment, “seemed unable to submit”.
Wood is a superb writer, intelligent and honest. She can sum people up in a few well-judged words: the narrow hips and flat belly of a local woman are “neat as a box of chocolates”. The austere landscape, with its “fine skin of pale grasses”, is a commanding presence.
This winner of the Stella Prize (an Australian literature award for women) understands the power of restraint and simplicity. And she is unafraid of taking on the big questions: What is faith? Is true forgiveness possible? How can grief be accommodated? There are no easy answers. As one nun explains, prayer is “a way to interrupt your own habitual thinking”. The narrator longs to understand this, sometimes feels near a breakthrough just before she falls asleep, but, “In the morning, when the birds start, belief is as thin as light.”
Is Charlotte Wood, as a UK reviewer suggests, worthy of being ranked alongside Elizabeth Strout or Penelope Lively? No question. Stone Yard Devotional is an extraordinary novel.
