“A feeling that something is coming, waiting to be born, out of this time. Almost physical, like before a period, or pregnancy, or vomiting. Something is getting ready to resolve itself.”
The Booker journey continues with Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional (Allen & Unwin 2023), yet another thin volumed character reflection, heavy on the introspective and light on the plot. (Page count is just under 300, but font and spacing come into play with that.) Surprisingly, this one edged out a few of the other selections that I’ve just lumped together. Wood is the first Australian to be longlisted since Coetzee in 2016. (Born in South Africa, Coetzee moved to Australia in 2002 and became an Australian citizen in 2006.)
The plot of the novel is that a woman abandons her city life, job, and husband and joins a secluded religious community on the outskirts of the town she grew up in. She initially went just on a retreat there for the solitude, but she eventually joins the community. She doesn’t believe in God, and she isn’t really a nun, but she lives that life with the sisters. (And keeps her thoughts on God and heaven to herself.) It’s the peace and solitude that brings her comfort, a peace and solitude that almost makes her a believer.
The novel is set during Covid, but the pandemic isn’t what disrupts the quiet community and forces the narrator to look more inward – a mouse plague (the parts about the mice are truly horrific – just wheelbarrows full of dead mice, mice eating each other, mice eating faces off of doves, etc.), the bones of a murdered Sister who had left the community to serve in Thailand and has been returned to be buried there, and a famous activist nun from the narrator’s childhood who accompanies the bones are what disrupts the status quo and makes a novel of reflection turn even more inward.
I do take issue with the title. While catchy, the stone yard paddock is only mentioned three times (I think) and it’s not the paddock our narrator has her moments in. It is, however, where the bones of the murdered nun are buried. But I wish it had also been where our narrator had her quiet reflective moments under the night sky.
It’s a novel of faith and forgiveness, childhood, and how the choices we make determine our selves.
Booker Count: 10 of 13
A Girl Named Tommi 