Book review: Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

Having loved The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend – two very different books by Charlotte Wood – I didn’t know what to expect from Stone Yard Devotional. All I knew was that it was going to be good, after it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and attracted wide praise.

This novel was very different to Woods’ previous novels (I’m in awe of writers’ ability to switch entirely between tones and topics).

While The Natural Way of Things was chilling and protesting, and The Weekend was warm and funny, Stone Yard Devotional wasn’t really any of these things.

Set in a convent in New South Wales, the novel follows the story of a woman who decides to live a monastic life, despite not being terribly religious.

Instead, she is an observer of the world and people around her. Wood writes of the mouse plague in a way that is disgusted but also resigned, in the same way that the nuns and narrator experience the relentless skuttling of tiny feet.

She also observes arrivals of an old classmate and the remains of a former nun, accepting their presence with a quiet unease.

Despite the tolerance (or resignation?) of the nuns, the narrator identifies the very human irritations that the nuns face, simmering under a calm and kind surface. I wondered what would interrupt this apparent calm – would the mice eventually pierce the surface, or the abrupt and forthright visitor?

While the novel was calm and slow in its contemplation, I didn’t feel bored by it. Instead, I enjoyed the pace and almost felt the calm of the nuns as they carried out their repetitive days of song, prayer and household jobs.

This novel felt both new, in the sense that it is unlike anything else I have read by Wood, and old in its setting, characters and story. It cements Wood as one of my favourite Australian authors and I’ll be waiting for her next – probably entirely different – book.