Book review: Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

Reading the opening pages of Stone Yard Devotional, the latest novel by Stella Prize-winning Australian author Charlotte Wood, felt for me like sliding into a warm bath on a cool evening. A strange way, perhaps, to describe the experience of immersing myself in this sparse, meditative novel of grief, faith and morality, but also one that gets at some of the pleasure of knowing yourself to be in the skilful hands of a writer who — 10 books into a celebrated, lengthy career — really knows what she’s about. Those opening pages follow the arrival of Wood’s narrator — an unnamed woman — at a religious community that’s home to a small group of nuns, near the town where the narrator grew up amid the unforgiving highlands of the Monaro, in southern New South Wales. Though an atheist, she finds in this strange, quiet place where “the hours are so long and there is so much waiting, staring into space” some reprieve from the troubles of the outside world: the breakdown of her marriage, her persistent grief following the deaths of her parents, and the despair that prompted her to abandon a career dedicated to saving threatened species. A number of interconnected events gradually unravel over the course of the novel, which is set largely during the height of the COVID pandemic. There’s a mouse plague, prompted by changing weather patterns and at times viscerally horrifying in its detail, which coincides with the impending arrival of the bones of a nun, a former resident who went missing while running a women’s shelter in Thailand and is finally being returned to be buried by her religious sisters. The person charged with accompanying these remains is Helen Parry, a “radical environmentalist nun” well known for her steadfast activism for a variety of causes. She’s also a figure from the narrator’s childhood, and is described by her as bringing “into our home, without apology, everything we so painstakingly left behind” in choosing this cloistered life. The narrator is thus forced to reflect on her past and her fears that, in coming here, she has abdicated her responsibilities to her friends and former colleagues, but also towards both witnessing and seeking to address the overwhelming troubles of “all the world’s catastrophes, all the justice work undone, the poor unsupported, the natural creatures unprotected, rights unfought-for”. Some readers may, I suspect, find Stone Yard Devotional more elusive than Wood’s previous two literary hits, The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend. But this is my favourite of her novels that I’ve yet read: written in beautifully understated prose, it’s intimate, engaging and willing to sit with the complexities of the timely questions it poses about community, forgiveness, the things we prefer not to see, and how to do — and be — “good”. STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL Charlotte Wood (Allen & Unwin, $32.99) I’D RATHER NOT Robert Skinner (Black Inc., $27.99) THE BEST AUSTRALIAN SCIENCE WRITING 2023 Donna Lu (NewSouth, $32.99) “Science writing reveals to us new insights about ourselves, yes, but uniquely it also encompasses the vastness of the universe and all the diverse life forms within it,” writes Donna Lu, editor of the latest instalment of this popular annual anthology. Fittingly, it covers subjects ranging “from the microscopic to the astronomical”, among them “some of the biggest problems of our time”: climate change, biodiversity loss, and medical research. Highlights include Jacinta Bowler’s piece on a project in the WA desert designed to “tell us more about black holes, gravitational waves and almost every part of the universe” and Rebecca Giggs’ poignant essay on the once-prolific bogong moth.