Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

Although I have long been a fan of the Australian Charlotte Wood, I hesitated to begin this one until I read Ron Charles’ enthusiastic review. I wasn’t sure I would appreciate a book with little plot and lots of musings, but I agree with Ron Charles, it is extraordinary.

The narrator begins by describing a visit to a monastery she makes seeking solitude. We learn little about her life at the outset; her husband had just flown to Britain, one of the sisters told her she had read on the internet that her work was impressive. After several visits over some years, she, though she is a non-believer, lives as one of the sisters. We learn about her through her effort to understand why she was there, and through her musings about her own and others’ lives. On the question of decamping to the monastery, she says, “You do not announce on Facebook that you, an atheist, are leaving your job and your home and your husband to join a cloistered religious community. I mean you could, and it might be a better way than I chose which was not to announce anything to anyone. People were wounded. Very wounded.” And later, “But what seemed, still is, impossible to explain was that I didn’t plan anything. I came back here one last time and then just…didn’t go home.” She says,

There may be a word in another language for what brought me to this place; to describe my particular kind of despair at that time. But I’ve never heard a word to express what I felt and what my body knew, which was that I had a need, a animal need, to find a place I had never been but which was still, in some undeniable way, my home.

That doesn’t explain her choice, but it clarifies why she was there as clearly as she could. Later she describes her revulsion at some of the sisters’ views.

What I could not tolerate was the ‘falling in love with Jesus’ talk that I knew would come next, and it did. I find it nauseating; surely this life should be composed of something more sober than that. Something austere, and momentous, and powerful. Close attention, hard thinking. A wrestling, to subdue…what? Ego. The self. Hatred. Pride. But no, instead we have Sissy, and also Carmel, simpering that they are here because I fell in love with Jesus and want to live with him in heaven. As if they’re talking about some teen idol crush. I have learned not to roll my eyes but there are times it is nearly impossible.

A plot does develop relating to a former member of the community who left when she was called to do dangerous work in Bangkok protecting abused women. She was murdered by an American Catholic priest and her bones were found years later after a flood. The bones were brought for burial to the monastery by an activist sister, Helen Parry, who, it happened, grew up in the narrator’s hometown which was near the monastery. Helen Parry was treated badly by the narrator, other children in the community, and by her mother. She made it clear she didn’t care and she grew up to become a well-known and fearless activist. And the narrator admitted to her shame that the term apex predator came to her when thinking of Helen Parry. The backdrop for this complication for the monastery is a plague of mice that was horrifying to read. The mostly vegetarian sisters had to look for more and more efficient ways to kill the mice and deeper excavations for their burial.

As we neared the end of the book, along with the drumbeat of the mouse plague, her stories of people she had known and her thoughts became more intense. As I said earlier, I was doubtful about reading someone’s musings, but I found this book to be somehow comforting and thought-provoking at the same time. It was extraordinarily wonderful.

Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional, Riverhead Books, 2025 (orig. published 2023 in Australia), 295 pages. I read the Kindle edition. Available in the public library.