I always like reading a Charlotte Wood novel and I particularly loved The Natural Way of Things for which she won the Stella Prize.
Stone Yard Devotional is a gentle rhythmic story of one woman’s withdrawal from her family, friends and society to live with a group of nuns in a religious community not far from where she grew up. There is no plot or fast-moving action just a contemplative reflection on the people who live there and exploration of the woman’s own guilt and failings about her parents and her part in bullying a young girl called Helen.
There are three significant events that happen while the woman is there. A mouse plague of biblical proportions arrives, the skeletal remains of a nun which is returned for burial with a woman who turns out to be Helen from her childhood.
The writing is as you’d expect, brilliant and I couldn’t help but be transported along this woman’s journey looking for forgiveness.
‘In the night I am drawn from sleep by a deep, thrumming rattle. I switch on my bedside lamp and see that the fly screen over my closed window is crawling with leaping, climbing mice. When the light goes on a shiver goes through the mass, and their scrambling becomes more frenzied.”
The mouse plague made my skin crawl and the mice grow more grotesque in description, the more uncomfortable the woman becomes with her reflections of guilt. It was a relief when the mouse plague ended for the reader and the woman. And that for me is the mark of great writing.
This book won’t be for everyone but it’s not long and I found myself rivetted even though we never really get answers to the question of why she decided to withdraw herself from everything. We contemplate and surmise it but the answer not handed to us.
It’s a thought-provoking personal story of a woman’s journey to find peace, beautifully told.
S.C. Karakaltsas 