In Search of an Escape

While not as prominent as its other English literary counterparts, Australian literature is, nevertheless, an integral part of the entire body of anglophone literature. However, its original form was neither written nor English. The earliest form of Australian literature was oral in form and originated in Australian aboriginal people who occupied the island long before the arrival of the European colonists. Their rich oral literary tradition comprises songs, legends, and stories handed down from generation to generation. Most are ceremonial in nature. The advent of colonialism marked the beginning of the written form of literature. Initial published works captured the experiences of European explorers, settlers, and convicts. While it is a part and parcel of the broader tradition, English literature, Australian literature has since developed a distinct character of its own, with the topography of the Land Down Under prominently featured.

Australia has since produced a phalanx of writers whose storytelling and writing have captivated the world. Among the prominent Australian writers are David Malouf, Peter Carey, Thomas Keneally, Colleen McCullough, Nevil Shute, and Gerald Murnane who is always part of the Nobel Prize in Literature conversations. Their oeuvres and individual works have been lauded, earning them accolades worldwide. Some of their works are fundamental parts of contemporary literary discourses. Some of their works transcend time and physical borders, with some even included in must-read lists. Not to be outdone, Australia produced a Nobel Laureate in Literature, Patrick White who was recognized by the Swedish Academy in 1973. In its motivation for recognizing White, the Swedish Academy lauded him for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature.

Carrying the torch of this rich literary tradition is a generation of equally talented writers. Among the frontrunners is Charlotte Wood, dubbed as among Australia’s most original writers by literary pundits. Making her literary debut in 1999 with the publication of Pieces of a Girl, she has since produced works that have been critically well-received and amassed citations from prestigious literary prizes. All of these underline her being tagged as a prominent voice in Australian if not world literature. In 2023, she made her literary comeback with the publication of Stone Yard Devotional. This comes four years after her previous work, The Weekend. Like her previous works, the novel was warmly received by readers and literary pundits alike. It was nominated for several literary prizes such as the Miles Franklin Award, Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, and Barbara Jefferis Award.

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, an animal need, to find a place I had never been but which was still, in some undeniable way, my home.

  Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

Guiding the readers across the topography of Wood’s seventh is a middle-aged anonymous female narrator who, at the commencement of the story, was visiting her parents’ grave site for the first time in three decades. She just arrived at a monastery close to her parent’s gravesite. With personal and professional crises looming, the unnamed woman was staying at the monastery’s guesthouse on a retreat; she described the monastery as having the feel of a 1970s health resort or eco-commune. Despondent, she spent her days observing the nuns performing their daily tasks and simply wandering around the monastery. Nevertheless, the tranquility that embraced her at the monastery was far removed from the bedlam of her life outside of it. Despite her ambivalence at the start, the reclusive life at the monastery slowly appealed to her, something she neither could understand nor explain.

Soon after, her retreat ended but with her life outside unraveling – her marriage was on the rocks – she returned to the monastery. The second time around, it was not for a retreat but rather she returned to stay for good. In the process, she left her career at the Threatened Species Rescue Center. Slowly, she immersed herself in the activities of the monastery. She started participating in daily activities and even joined meetings with the nuns. Her stay in the monastery was marked by three significant events. The first of which was a mouse plague. The community and the monastery were overrun by mice. A drought in the northern sections of the country prompted the mice to migrate to the south; the monastery was located somewhere in New South Wales. Horror descended as the nuns were forced to deal with the infestation. They tried to be kind to the invaders, respecting them as living creatures.

The novel was juxtaposed with the COVID-19 pandemic, and its vestiges were subtly woven into the story. The monastery may be detached from the outside world but outside events find their way into the citadel that is the monastery. The mice infestation was the most pervasive of these events, an allegory of absolute invasion. Despite the kindness exhibited by the women, the mice were unforgiving. They had no scruples consuming everything, from electrical equipment to food rations and stores. Their presence was a stark contrast to the stillness of monastic life. Even though they were incognito, their squeaks and the sound of their tiny legs running across everywhere permeated the air. They were ubiquitous. Soon, the women took to arms and started setting up traps for the mice. They also dug mass graves for the dead creatures. Wood’s description of the plague was vivid and visceral, brimming with grotesqueries, almost reflective of the bubonic plague. It was a relief when the plague finally ended.

The second pivotal moment in the story was the news of Sister Jenny. Sister Jenny was once part of the monastery and a close friend of Sister Bonaventure, one of the nuns. Sister Jenny moved to Thailand where she ran an institution where abused women can seek refuge. However, she disappeared following a confrontation with a suspected sexual abuser. Nobody was able to find her body until flooding unearthed her bones. Her bones were to be returned to the monastery to be buried there despite uncertainties about it being allowed. With the arrival of Sister Jenny’s remains looming, the narrator was increasingly invested in this development. This was a stark dichotomy to her earlier pronouncement of being nonchalant in fostering friendship with the other occupants of the monastery. It seems that she was wary of female companionship and friendship.

I used to think there was a ‘before’ and ‘after’ most things that happen to a person; that a fence of time and space could separate even quite catastrophic experience from the ordinary whole of life. But now I know that with a great devastation of some kind, there is no before or after. Even when the commotion of crisis has settled, it’s still there, like that dam water, insisting, seeping, across the past and the future.

  Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

This comes to a head when she learns about another prominent nun who was escorting Sister Jenny. Like Sister Jenny, Sister Helen Parry has earned celebrity status, perhaps the most popular of the nuns from the convent. Sister Helen Parry and the narrator, we learn, grew up together and were once schoolmates. Helen Parry – the narrator always referred to her by her complete name – has become an environmental and human rights activist. Helen Parry’s looming presence also threatens to disrupt the harmony in the convent. She was a daunting figure, confident in her every move. This was a new version of Helen Parry, a version far removed from the one that the narrator met when they were younger. Despite being in the convent, Helen Parry continued to work, always preoccupied with the phone. Sister Helen Parry is another intrusion from the outside realms who brings into our home, without apology, everything we so painstakingly left behind.

These three events stand out in a novel that is bereft of a robust plot. Nevertheless, Stone Yard Devotional finds strength in its careful observation and ruminations about a plethora of subjects, with these three events being primary catalysts. The narrator’s first rumination, however, revolves around despair. Even before entering the convent, she was wallowing in futility. Her marriage was failing and her career was also suffering. These were further exacerbated by her feeling of futility on a looming climate catastrophe. Her retreat to the convent was a form of escape from the elements that she could no longer control, a means of escape from her despair. Adding to this feeling of despair is the grief that kept hounding her. During her stay at the convent, she kept revisiting memories of her parents, particularly of her mother. Her mother was the epitome of kindness, a woman described as humanitarian. Her mother was respectful of other beliefs.

By extension, the narrator’s ruminations on her mother explore another underlying theme that revolves around morality, mainly on doing what is right. Before she escaped to the convent, the narrator dedicated her life to pursuing the “right” causes, imbibing the values bequeathed to her by her mother. Even the other characters were advocating for what they believed were the right causes. Sister Jenny fought for battered women. Sister Helen Parry was a vocal environmental activist. Even when the nuns were caught in a quandary regarding Sister Jenny’s burial. Their initial actions toward the mice infestation were also suggestive of being kept within the bounds of doing what was right. However, one’s moral compass is rarely straightforward. In another flashback, we read how the narrator’s school social group got embroiled in the bullying of a fellow student. This instance of bullying escalated into an assault, a memory that haunted the narrator years later.

My mother said that anything that had once been alive should go back into the soil. Food scraps went into the compost, of course, including meat and bones, despite the general advice against this. Paper, torn into strips to allow air and microbes to move freely through. She would cut old pure cotton or silk or woollen clothes into small shreds and compost them too. Fish bones and flesh. Linen tea towels. She reluctantly left out larger pieces of wood, but longed for a woodchipper. She left cane furniture to rot and then buried it. She quoted a Buckingham Palace gardener she had once seen on television, who added leather boots to his compost bin. All that was needed was time, and nature.

  Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

As the story moves forward, the specter of the past keeps looming; it continues to play a germane role in the present. It is yet another form of intrusion but also another means of understanding one’s self. As the narrator withdraws from the rest of the world, she contemplates the roles she played in past events and even female friendships. Like most of us, the narrator was yearning for something more. With the novel set in a convent, her reflections naturally careen toward religion. Interestingly, the narrator is not religious and remains so despite being surrounded by eight nuns. Instead, the novel dwells on spirituality rather than religiosity. It was neither faith nor religion that prompted her to seek refuge in the convent. Rather, she wanted to escape the trappings of modern life while also devoting herself to servitude. It was an attempt to attend to herself and become an oblate.

In the process, her pursuit turned into an introspection where she grapples with seminal questions alluding to a plethora of subjects such as forgiveness and atonement, the nature of religious beliefs, the intricacies of memories, and even the fragility of one’s life. She aims to understand the idea of devoting one’s self to a larger pursuit. Answers to these questions were often bluntly delivered, bereft of sentimentality. Interestingly, despite providing a window into her world, the narrator’s relationship with the reader is kept at arm’s length. Except for vignettes of her childhood, we never get to learn about her other personal tragedies. Her voice was somber, rarely intimate, perhaps an influence of the repetitiveness of monastic life. Instead of stepping into her mind, we become part of her routine, a listener to her ruminations. Beyond her introspection, other personal tragedies were swirling around her. There were suicides, murders, and accidents that disrupted not only the monastic life but also rural life.

As we slowly immerse ourselves in the reflections of the unnamed narrator, we begin to understand that her anonymity was deliberate. Her reflections are slowly becoming our own. Her yearning for an escape from the bedlam of quotidian existence mirrors our own. Stone Yard Devotional is brimming with philosophical intersections and contemplation. The narrator reflects on how we can adversely impact the people around us, our parents, a stranger, or a schoolmate. Thus begins a quiet spiritual journey toward redemption. Beyond the pursuits of redemption and yearning for a different life, the novel grapples with a plethora of questions about life, existence, climate change, catastrophe, and even the past. All of these various elements were astutely woven together into a silently lush story by Charlotte Wood. Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, Stone Yard Devotional is a quietly powerful and thought-provoking book.

When I think about the phases of my life, it is as a series of rooms behind me, each with a door to a previous room left open, behind which is another room, and another and another. The rooms are not quite empty, not exactly dark, but they are shadowy, with indistinct shapes, and I don’t like to think about them much. When I hear the name ‘Helen Parry’, I think of those rooms furthest back, in the deepest shadows.

  Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional
Book Specs

Author: Charlotte Wood
Publisher: Sceptre
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 293
Genre: Literary

Synopsis

Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Australian outback.

She doesn’t believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.

But disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signalling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who disappeared decades before, presumed murdered. And finally, a troubling visitor plunges the narrator further back into her past…

About the Author

Charlotte Wood was born in 1965 in Cooma, New South Wales where she was also raised. She was one of five siblings. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Charles Sturt University and a Master of Creative Arts from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). She has a PhD from the University of New South Wales

Wood made her literary debut in 1999 with the publication of her first novel, Pieces of a Girl. It was a critical success that earned Wood the 1999 Jim Hamilton Prize and the 2000 Dobbie Award. It marked the commencement of a critically successful literary career. Her sophomore novel, The Submerged Cathedral (2004), was equally warmly received by literary classics, earning Wood more literary award nominations. Her fifth novel, The Natural Way of Things (2015), won the Stella Prize and was a co-winner of the 2016 Prime Minster’s Award. The Weekend (2019) was also shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Her latest novel, Stone Yard Devotional (2023), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, and the Barbara Jefferis Award.

In 2016, Wood was made a Member of the Order of Australia, 2019 Queen’s Birthday Honours in recognition of her “significant service to literature.” She was also named by The Australian Financial Review as one of 100 Women of Influence for Arts, Culture, and Sport in 2019. In 2014, she was appointed Chair of Arts Practice, Literature, at the Australia Council for the Arts, a three-year appointment. In 2016, Wood was the Writer in Residence Fellowship at the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre. Wood also published three works of non-fiction.

Wood currently resides in Sydney, Australia.