Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood: The Morality of Retreat
by Benita Becker
Do you ever wish you could escape the world as it is now? Politics, climate, poverty, oppression, suffering… it all becomes so overwhelming. Should we feel guilty for wanting to escape? How much should we be in the world? How much should we retreat? And at what point is it ethical to do either? These are the questions that Australian author, Charlotte Wood, poses in her novel Stone Yard Devotional.
The narrative follows an unnamed, atheist woman who leaves her husband and her job as an endangered species activist to live with nuns in a rural New South Wales monastery in her hometown. Here, she reminisces on the early death of her parents, her childhood memories, and of various observations she made of other people’s lives – looking back at the past through the lens of maturity to reveal newfound understanding.
The form of this epistolary novel reflects its own namesake: a devotional. Just like the nuns who pray for different afflicted people each day, we follow the narrator who reflects on a different memory each day. Whether it be the memory of an abused woman her mother befriended, or the memory of a boy whose mum had died in a road accident… we follow a daily meditation on life.
At the same time, we are gently carried between these memories to her new life in the monastery growing vegetables, cooking, navigating her relationships with the sisters, and attending daily prayers. Readers are lulled into a sense of rest - of mindfulness almost - when she first enters the monastery, and it can be a very calming read. We get the sense that she has achieved her goal of retreating from the world, that is, until the world catches up with her.
Reality makes itself known with the arrival of a mouse plague, of Covid, and of the skeletal remains of a nun. Each of these things represent the despair we feel at the state of the world now – of climate disasters, violence, and suffering. The writing at this point in the novel is quintessential Australian gothic: it reveals the darker side to rural life, the hostility of the environment, and the impact of human destruction. At some points it is downright creepy and reveals a sharp change from the initial calmness of the novel.
It is during this time that the narrator begins to wrestle with her own contradicting morals or the awareness of her own cognitive dissonance. She thinks on the “savagery of the Catholic church” while living in a monastery, acts upon the killing of mice while being mostly vegetarian and an animal activist, but most importantly she does nothing while believing change needs to happen and caring deeply for the natural world. This moral struggle comes to the forefront with the uncomfortable arrival of Helen Parry – an old school classmate who was ruthlessly bullied, now a fiery, outspoken celebrity climate activist nun. As Covid confines them both, Helen is busy doing and acting and fighting for nature, while our narrator succumbs to her despair and grief.
Altogether, Stone Yard Devotional is a truly thoughtful novel that reflects on our own moral struggles in the face of a looming environmental crisis, and it invites us to ask where we stand in it. Most of all, it shows us that we can’t escape from reality, from mortality, from sin, or from despair. But we can withdraw in order to feel it, process it, and try to make sense of it. And somewhere within that reflection, we will come to understand that to be human is to be imperfect. "Not denounced, not forgiven."
You can borrow this book yourself from Bond Library by either finding it in the Popular Reading section or by placing a Click & Collect through the following link: Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood