Recently shortlisted for the Booker prize, Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood completes a trilogy of original fiction that has propelled the author into the literary stratosphere. Stone Yard Devotional is a worthy successor to the lauded books The Weekend and the Stella Prize-winning The Natural Way of Things. It is a quieter, more reflective novel than either of those two works, but its thematic resonances haunt the reader long after the final page is turned.
A first-person narrator abandons her city life and marriage to return to her regional hometown. She holes up in a small religious community, helping the small gaggle of nuns who call the place home. The character comes to rest in the monastic rhythms of the place. The entire novel is set out much like a diary – memories and anecdotes punctuated by observations or a record of daily activity.
Beneath it all, the protagonist wrestles with her mother’s death. A series of disturbing arrivals offsets this. A mouse plague besets the retreat; an old school friend shows up as a guest and the bones of a long-missing nun are finally brought back to her home. Do not expect these to build to the cinematic climax of The Natural Way of Things or the searing satire of The Weekend. This is a meditative work where the themes and ideas circle the character’s consciousness.
Wood manages to avoid the literary onanism that befalls so much literary fiction. Her prose is sparse and precise and she is unafraid of humour. Each of the characters populating the story is drawn with compassion and skill.
Wood’s embrace of darkness also makes the novel difficult to resist. At times, it relies on tropes of the horror genre: the emergence of ghosts and the ungodly plague. In the character’s memory, horror anecdotes abound, as she herself wrestles with the nature of good and evil: child abuse, suicide and domestic violence all feature.
A lesser writer would have indulged in Wood’s heady chosen themes: religion, death and forgiveness. Wood’s masterful restraint makes space for an organic profundity that surprises the reader. No moments outstay their welcome.
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Stone Yard Devotional is a masterful novel worthy of praise and attention. It is not that Wood’s reputation needs to be cemented, but it affirms her standing as one of Australia’s greatest writers.
Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 9781761069499
Format: Paperback
Pages: 320pp
Release date: 3 October 2023
RRP: $32.99
