Review: Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood
This latest novel from Sydney author Charlotte Wood has all the apocalyptic strangeness that pervaded her Stella Prize-winning The Natural Way of Things and was also present, though more subtly, in The Weekend, and keeps her firmly in that most elusive of categories: the literary page-turner.
In Stone Yard Devotional, a woman abandons her marriage, job and entire city life to return to the place of her childhood, holing up in a small religious community outside a tiny country town, despite being a staunch atheist.
She gradually adjusts to the community’s meditative rhythms, but the peace is disturbed by three visitations: first, a plague. Second, a body. And third, a visitor.
In characteristically sublime yet pared-back prose, Wood reaches for the higher truths behind these visitations and their disturbance of a self-imposed exile.
She explores the fantasies we all entertain: of escape, giving in, letting go: of “choosing disappearance … [and] the costs of those decisions”.
As her character’s mind roves restlessly through vignettes from her past, disappearance in this novel takes many forms: she and various remembered and current figures disappear from marriage, from the present, from home countries, from friends, from society, and ultimately from life itself.
It is calm, wise, reflective, full of humanity but also a quiet rage at the world humans have created. A sense of violence bubbles just beneath the surface, occasionally breaking through, like the mice whose infestation turns a quiet refuge into a killing field. Complete with stench.
I was drawn to picking it up again and again, as drawn as I have been to some most swashbuckling thrillers, despite this being a story about a bunch of nuns living in the country. It might be Wood’s most compulsive read yet, and that’s saying something.
If I had to find a fault, I would say perhaps it ended leaving me wanting more, but this could quite easily be reversed into a compliment: leaving someone wanting more is perhaps the best possible outcome for an author and Charlotte Wood gives you the space to let you decide for yourself. If you want a book with a lot of action and a traditional plot line, tying life up into a nice neat little bow, Charlotte Wood is perhaps not for you.
She is for you if you enjoy authors such as Helen Garner, Elizabeth Strout or Ann Patchett, and there is plenty here for a book club to get its teeth into.
Charlotte Wood’s writing articulates my inner life better than I can to myself, and makes me feel less alone in the universe. To me that’s one of a book’s highest purposes, so I can’t praise an author any higher.
Wood is in conversation with Geraldine Blake this Friday 17th November 6.30pm at Beaufort Street Books, Mount Lawley. Bookings here.
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