Stone Yard Devotional

 

Book Review

Title: Stone Yard Devotional

Author: Charlotte Wood

Publisher: Sceptre 2023

Pages: 297

When a novel starts with a middle-aged woman giving up her job in despair and entering into retreat in a cloistered convent where soon arrives the bones of a nun who died long ago elsewhere, it may be presumed to be a suspense thriller or crime fiction. Add plague in the background with mice running all around, and it can become horror. Then comes in another character who was absolutely disliked by the narrator in their schooldays.

Charlotte Wood’s latest novel has all of these but it is no thriller or crime fiction or horror story. It is an allegory of sorts on very gentle themes like forgiveness and redemption.

The narrator has no name in the novel. The nun who comes with the bones of Sister Jenny who died two decades ago was a school classmate of the narrator. Jenny was probably killed by an American missionary priest in Bangkok where the nun was rendering her services too. Jenny had just vanished, in fact, after the priest had dragged her away one day. Her bones were unearthed by a flood some twenty years later. The congregation decided to give the bones a proper religious burial and that’s why Sister Helen Parry was brining them to the convent where the narrator was in retreat.

Helen Parry was one of the classmates of the narrator. Helen was disliked by all classmates including the narrator because she was a bully. “This girl,” let me quote, “as well as being loud, wore her uniform tight and very short, and her breasts developed too early. Someone claimed to know that she had got her first period at age eleven, which was disgusting, a fact that spoke to her general vulgarity. On the girl the tight short tunic looked more live poverty than sex, but that was there too, animal and fierce.”

Helen was disliked by not only her classmates but also the teachers. One day Helen became the target of her classmates’ hatred and physical assault. Even the narrator “tried my best to get a few pushes or blows in through the shrieking mob surrounding her.” Helen bit her on her hand and drew blood.

Helen was maltreated by her mother in the first place. She had an acutely painful childhood at home, and school as well. This Helen goes on to become a Catholic nun as well as a social activist.

The narrator, now, is repentant of what she had done as a little girl to Helen. Repentance and forgiveness play a dominant role in the narrative. Sister Bonaventure of the convent says that she had a deep friendship with Sister Jenny whose bones are now returning to the convent. “I’m not praying for her forgiveness,” Bonaventure says to the narrator, “I’m trying to find a shred of it in myself.”

Why? We are never told. We, humans, are frail creatures and so we hurt others frequently, sometimes knowingly and at other times unwittingly. We are hurt similarly by others too. We all need forgiveness and redemption. That isn’t easy, however. “What does it take, to atone, inside yourself? To never be forgiven?” The narrator asks herself.

Towards the end of the narrative, we are even given a short homily on forgiveness. “There are four steps to true forgiveness… uncovering the nature of the harm; the decision phase, in which to explore whether to grant forgiveness or withhold it; the necessary ‘work’; and the final step, deepening or discovery.”

There is a lot to discover in this novel about ourselves. The novel takes us on a meditation course. It forces us to look within, deep within, and remember the hurts we received and gave. And the need for forgiveness.

Faith, solitude, and the complexities of human relationship are the other themes that the novel touches upon gracefully. In spite of all the mice that are running around all through the novel due to the plague that was raging at that time in the Monaro Plains in New South Wales, Australia.

Charlotte Wood is an accomplished novelist and this work of hers was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024. Let me end this with a quote that underscores the lyrical charm of Wood’s narrative style.

Filling the birdbath after Vigils this morning, I realised that the muffled flapping of the cockatoos’ wings as they swoop down to the bath resembles the sound of the mice scuttling in the night. The mouse plague is infecting everything now; all sense of smell, of course, but even sound, even memory.

We, the readers, get infected too. We realise how much there is in our life to atone for and to forgive. This is a great work. Go for it if you like deep readings.