Dave's Book Blog: "Stone Yard Devotional" by Charlotte Wood

Tuesday, 20 May 2025

"Stone Yard Devotional" by Charlotte Wood

Life is a struggle against nature. Live with it.

A woman, an atheist, seeking a refuge from the world visits a Roman Catholic religious community of women in a rural Australia. There is a plague of mice. The body of one of the members, who disappeared years ago in Thailand, is returned to the abbey. The famous nun who accompanies the bones is someone whom the narrator used to know, the victim of bullying when they were schoolgirls together. This is the cue for a lot of guilt and the seeking of forgiveness. Other memories, mostly of people dying, and the need to kill the cannibalistic mice, put life into context.

It's written in a diary style without explicitly being a diary: some present tense, mostly past. The perspective is first-person from PoV of the never-named protagonist.

One of the themes seems to centre around Hamlet's question: "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them?" Almost on the last page of Part Two, Sister Helen Parry, the visiting nun, tells the community at breakfast that "if you don't live your rightful dharma, then you will cause grave spiritual injury to yourself". Ironically, this is a Buddhist philosophy and Buddhists tend to seek acceptance of the world and detachment from it but Helen Parry is activist, forever campaigning. The other nuns take Helen's comment as a criticism for their life of retreat from the world and Sister Bonaventure responds "I was born for this life". The narrator herself has struggled to understand the relevance of chanting the Psalms, poems written over two thousand years ago, to the community's life and the book is, on one level, her journey of acceptance of ritualised meaninglessness in order to achieve spiritual awakening.

One thing that the narrator needs to accept is the Darwinian world of life, predation and death. (So many Australian books seem to centre on life as an endless, and losing, battle against a hostile natural world which surely can't help their tourist industry.) The book's final words are "reverence for the earth itself". This seems a key message.

It is difficult to see what has made this book so popular among reviewers. There's little finely crafted prose. I picked out one or two nice descriptions:

"The sweeping, broad structure of this land gently shifts from one plane into another, each sloping yet almost flat, like a shoulder blade." (Part One, Day Four)
"I woke with the thin blanket pulled up to my chin for protection ... The sticky cobweb of it clung to me through Vigils, through showering, through breakfast." (Part Two, p 192) I liked 'sticky cobweb'.

But on the whole to writing is like the landscape, plain and unrelenting. Nor is there anything thrilling about the plot which is very simple, although the juxtaposing of an atheist into this religious community and the coincidence of there being not one but two faces familiar from her schooldays (it helps that the abbey is not far from the narrator's home town) enables a continuing conflict to keep the readers interest alive. And it is direct, diving deep into the soul of our shared humanity and there is a raw honesty to the writing which gives it a powerful charge.

Selected quotes:

"Do all religions include some form of this repetitive movement? It feels ancient, superstitious. Walking in circles, bowing and prostrating, kneeling and standing. What is its purpose? Eradication of the ego in some way?" (Part One, Day Three)
"Today's psalms were not so full of evil foes but there was a lot of nationhood-praise stuff. ... I struggle to see the relevance of any of it to these women and their lives. What is the meaning of this ancient Hebrew bombast about enemies and borders and persecution? What's the point of their singing about it day after day after day?" (Part One, Day Three)
"My notion of prayer was juvenile: forget this telephone line to God bullshit, she snapped, hot with impatience. It wasn't even about God ... Praying was a way to interrupt your own habitual thinking. ... It's not chitchat; it's hard labour." (Part Two, p 161)
"What is most grotesque is this: every time I have found the cannibalised corpses, it is only the faces that are eaten away." (Part Two, pp 167 - 168)
"Expressions of intense emotion often take place when a person's thoracic spine is immobilised. It's to do with its relationship to the autonomic nervous system." (Part Two, p 185)
"I used to think there was a 'before' and 'after' most things that happen to a person; that a fence of time could separate even quite catastrophic experience from the ordinary whole of life." (Part Two, p 210)
"Annabel was so disgusted by greed, by the ruination of the natural world because of it, that, like the ascetics before her, the only action she could take was to remove herself, bit by bit, from the obscenity of the excess." (Part Three, p 268)
"It's been my observation over many years that those who most powerfully resist convention quite peaceably accept the state of being reviled." (Part Three, p 269)