"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)

Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.

May 2025; 293 pages

Published in the UK by Sceptre, a division of Hodder & Stoughton

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Juice" by Tim Winton

 Searching for refuge in a post-apocalyptic world, a man is forced to tell his life story, hoping to convince a bowman not to kill him.

This is a much applauded cli-fi epic whose has been twice short-listed for the Booker prize (1995 and 2002). The publishers say it is perfect for fans of Station Eleven and The Road; I really didn't like Station Eleven. 

Winton's writing is undeniably powerful. He has some wonderful descriptions. For example, at the start: “The sun appears. Molten. Slumped at the edges. Liquefying before us like a burning blimp.” (2) In the final paragraph: “A constellation of hovering birds. They were black and white and grey. Suspended in nothing, sculling air.” (513) And his writing style of short, punchy sentences or sentence fragments perfectly matches the edge-of-the-seat plot. This is a classy thriller.

But for me, as with Station Eleven, the basic story didn't work. I had no problem with the basic premise that the world has almost destroyed itself through climate change leading to massive depopulation during a period of Terror followed by a stable world of villagers and farmers eking out a precarious and fundamentally communal living from the scorched landscape. The problem arose when the hero was called and, despite reluctance, answered the call (very Hero's Journey). He is recruited by one of those super-efficient but utterly clandestine organisations that supervillains always seem to control in more contemporary thrillers. This organisation, the Service, train him and then send him on meticulously organised missions after which he is lavishly rewarded. It's all a little but too perfect. And does the Service serve the people? Do they help improve the agriculture or provide medical services? No. Each mission is dedicated to assassinating descendants of the families who used to own the wicked petrochemical (and other) companies that caused the climate to change. 

Talk about a dish best served cold. Even the Count of Monte Cristo spared the children of the those who had done him wrong. Even the Lord only visits the sins of the fathers upon the sons to the third or fourth generation. 

Three characters stand out: the protagonist, whose bildungsroman this is, his mother and his wife. Unfortunately the carefully crafted characters of the latter two were undermined by the twist close to the end.

It's a beautifully written thriller. There's a huge amount of world-building (which slows down the narrative) which results in the creation of huge amounts of verisimilitude when it comes to the cli-fi element. But in the end, the superhero and his Service are as absurd as any space opera. It seemed a shame. This is a man who can write powerfully but he was undermined by his ridiculous plot.

Selected quotes:

• “Once you've seen the posture of forced labour, you never forget it.” (8)
• “Each of us needs a little something of what the other has - food, water, building materials, parts, doctoring, scholarship, labour. Even the bards and jokers have their place.” (21)
• “Wringing your hands won't make water.” (27)
• “The great mystery of people lies in the many ways in which they'll deceive themselves.” (37)
• “Isn't there more to courage than suffering?” 165
• “Don't we take dead people's words? I said. Their stories? Skills? Ideas?” (207)
• “You’re like some wild-eyed pilgrim looking for paradise. No. Not me. They're searching for the end, those folks. I'm looking to start something.” (237)

January 2025; 513 pages

Published in 2024 in Australia by Hamish Hamilton

My edition, to which page number refer, is the Picador hardback issued in the UK by Picador

In the Winter Dark by Tim Winton is also reviewed on this blog. Other Australian fiction reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Dry" by Jane Harper

This is a murder mystery set in a drought-ridden small town in the back of beyond in Australia. Luke Hadler, his wife Karen and six year old Billy had been found head, gunned down. The evidence suggests that Luke, a farmer beset by debt, killed Karen and Billy (but not 13 month old baby Charlotte) before driving away and committing suicide.

Aaron Falk takes leave from his job with the finance police to attend the funeral of childhood friend Luke in the town from which he was chased twenty years ago following the death of a teenage girlfriend; he and Luke had both lied about their alibis. Was this crime anything to do with what happened twenty years ago? Falk and local bobby Raco start an unofficial investigation.

And the lack of water pervades everything.

This was a classic murder mystery with some delightful misdirection but clues were provided in time for the reader to work it out.

Selected quotes:

• "If Luke had a dollar, he'd spend two to make sure it was gone." (p 33)
• "call me liberated, but I've got a key to my own house." (p 52)
• "They'll make a gymnastics team, bending over backwards to prove their investigation was sound." (p 59)

Aaron Falk reappears in Force of Nature.

This book won the Gold Dagger from the Crime Writers' Association in  2017. Other winners include:

• Dodgers in 2016
• The Wench is Dead in 1989

January 2018; 400 pages

You can tell it's good when you catch yourself reading it when you should be doing other things.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"In the Winter Dark" by Tim Winton

The Sink: a lonely valley in rural Australia. An old farmer and his wife; their neighbour, retired from the city, and a pregnant girl.

Something is out there in the darkness, killing their animals.

But is it real or is it something that their haunted, guilty memories have created?

This book is written with lyrical beauty. Stunning.

I don't know if my selection of lines has properly done justice to the power of the writing but:

• “He set off, but something stopped him still as a stump. Between the trees he saw something. A movement. A silhouette. It was travelling. Loping, that was the word that came to him. He squinted ... The shadow seemed to stop, slip sideways between apple rows. And then there was nothing.” (p 6) 
• “The car left in the only direction it could - away.” (p 8)
• “she rested her low, full belly against the windowsill in the front room and felt the baby slip and kick inside her.” (p 9)
• “Out in the dark she saw the anaemic cheek of a full moon rising from the forest.” (p 9) 
• “And then everything crumbled and went the taste of shit in her mouth, the taste of blotting paper.” (p 10)
• “you could tell Ida had ideas for later when she cooked pork, but after nearly forty years of falling for it every time, a man has to pretend he doesn't know when he's being seduced.” (p 13)
• “I should have taken Ida out of this valley thirty years ago and never come back. To spare her the hardships, the hidden things, this night.” (p 15)
• “Was he having everyone's recollections, was it history that tormented him?” (p 17)
• “Oh, how the clink of knife and fork spoke its own language.” (p 27)
• “When are the continents begin to shift in you, you can't tell tomorrow from yesterday, you run just like that herd of pigs, over the cliff and into the water.” (p 34)
• “The Sink is the kind of place that always failed to deliver.” (p 36)
• “The rich think everybody's rich. That's their sin, forgetfulness.” (p 37) 
• “The pain would be like a hand clamping down on her skull and she could almost feel fingers creeping in under her scalp going hot and cold in waves that made her too frightened to move her eyes.” (p 59)
• “The night is full of stories. They float up like miasmas, as though the dead leave their dreams in the Earth where you bury them, only to have them rise to meet you in sleep.” (p 73)
• “She was as silly as a wheel.” (p 79)
• “Run a farm? You couldn't run a bloody tap” (p 86)
• “The drip of sagging gutters.” (p 94)

How have I never heard of this writer before? I must read more!

November 2017; 110 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Narrow Road to the Deep North" by Richard Flanagan

The life story of Dorrigo Evans, youngest child of a railwayman living on a smallholding in Tasmania who grows up to become a surgeon, the commanding officer of Australian Prisoners of War slaving for the Japanese on the Death Railway. It tells in graphic detail of the suffering of the starving men as they toil to build a railway in the jungle. It tells of his love, his marriage and his infidelities and the difficulty he and the other PoWs faced when they returned home. We find out what happened to the Japanese and Koreans who guarded them and treated them brutally. Some lives end quickly and some live for a long time but in the end we all live, we suffer, we love and we die.

And through it all men are helped to survive by art. Dorrigo learns poems by heart; he favours the classics: Homer and Catullus. The Japanese quote haikus. Early on, Dorrigo reads about a Japanese poet whose death poem was a simple circle. Is life a cycle or is it a line like the railway: the narrow road to the deep north.

This is a remarkable book. I toiled at first. It jumps around, flashing forward and backwards, sometimes swapping to the perspective of different characters. Right from the start there is a hint of a master at work in the fresh descriptions: page 4 has "verandah-browed wooden cottages". And the mixture of Dorrigo's beautiful, if adulterous, love affair and the horrors of the jungle makes one read on. But the book really took me towards the end, when it detailed the inabilities of so many of the survivors to find peace when they got home. Then it ends in great drama, with a most unexpected twist and a tremendous bush fire.

By the end I knew that I had been reading a masterpiece. And I suspect that it has taught me something important about life and survival and love and suffering and death.

January 2015; 448 pages

This book was shortlisted for the 2014 Waterstones Book of the Year and won the 2014 Booker Prize. Other Booker winners in this blog can be found here

I have just watched the TV series starring Jacob Elordi. Scarily, I could remember almost nothing of the book's plot but on re-reading my blog I discover that what the TV concentrated on - his love affair with Ella and the horrors of the prison-camp - were not really what impressed me about the book. 

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God