Booker Prize review: The wretched of the earth in Charlotte Wood’s novel ‘Stone Yard Devotional’

The first sign of the earth trying to warn you against impeding doom is animals behaving unnaturally. They flee their habitats, trade their silence for desperate noises, even commit mass suicide when the end is near and inevitable. When mice turn up dead at the religious retreat where the unnamed protagonist checks herself into in Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, her initial disgust and unwillingness to clean up the mess is replaced by a mechanical routine of disposing of the bodies before the stench becomes even more unbearable. In this nauseating exercise, the protagonist notices rats cannibalising their kin, feeding on dead birds, and causing general mayhem. The earth upturns itself by heaving up its most undesirable pests.

The arrival

A middle-aged woman at the end of her marriage and career drives up to a desolate landscape in Australia and lodges at a Christian retreat to rethink her life and the difficult deaths of her parents. At first, she abstains from socialising – she takes meals by herself, lies flat on the floor for the lack of anything better to do – but slowly gets herself busy in the daily life of the convent. This involves cleaning, cooking, washing. The women – nuns – don’t offer any holy escape. They go about their days doing chores as one would in their home. There are rare references to the lord and his miracles, and no transformations or redemptions.

The women – all packed closely together – behave more like young, hot-blooded girls instead of serene, enlightened nuns. Jealousies abound, there are hierarchies, cliques are formed. Some are distrustful of the others. It’s like a convent school hostel instead of an actual convent.

The narrator knows the circumstances that have brought her here – the absolute grief of losing her parents. The mundanity of life here is interspersed with her memories of them. She remembers how her mother seemed to have a secret life where no one was privy to her hurt while her father lived a practical life where he practised kindness with almost a conscious, laughable effort. She recalls the first batches of Vietnamese refugees that had arrived on the shores of her Australian town, the pair of orphans they had taken in, her parents’ Christian devotion to serving the refugees which despite noble intentions was still slightly racist. The earth where she buries the dead mice along with the other animals they have killed brings back memories of her mother tending to her garden and feeding the soil manure and compost. The Vietnamese orphans were terrified of the vast, arid Australian expanse for they feared the earth hid landmines. On the same earth, her mother grew fruits and vegetables that nourished the family. Through her mother, the narrator reiterates the Christian belief that “to dust you shall return.” The cycle of life – birth, nourishment, death, and decay – is contained within the earth.

But death is not always kind and useful. A sudden flood in Thailand flushes out Sister Jenny’s bones, a member of the convent who was murdered in Thailand many years ago. Her closest friend here feels possessive about the remains but a proper burial will be overseen by Helen Parry, a “celebrity nun” and a climate activist. The narrator remembers Parry as a child who was bullied at school but now, none of her old self remains. She is confident of her ways, is somewhat of a bully to the resident nuns, and struts about the convent with complete authority. The arrival of this guest – a visitation – disturbs the established order. Perry brings with her the confirmation that things are changing. Rapidly and for the worst. The climate news on the radio and the higher frequency at which the dead mice turn up signal the beginning of the end.

Waiting for departure

Still, the overwhelming presence of death around her does not convert the narrator. She remains an atheist but commits herself to the convent more out of the need to be useful than Christian devotion. She resigns herself to the dead mice and wilting vegetation, the bugs that fly in and the birds that drop dead. She turns to the convent in a moment of despair and now it seems to surround her. She reminds herself that to Catholics despair is the “ultimate sin” and the only way to stay afloat is to keep your eye and mind on the present, to go about your day. As the mice infestation becomes more serious and the earth starts to feel more alien, the narrator and the nuns can do nothing but clean up with extra rigour each day. An endless, futile pretence at normalcy.

The novel therefore also asks what a “retreat” means in end times – how does one seek shelter as the world collapses into itself with such catastrophic ultimateness? Especially, when the perpetrators of this violence – us humans – yearn to return to the earth after ravaging it thoughtlessly and violently for centuries? Perhaps we pray for a painless deliverance, perhaps we crucify ourselves for our sins, perhaps we banish ourselves to purgatory from where there is no escape. There are no easy answers.

The climate catastrophe, refugee crisis, poverty, and hunger are our collective fates. Like the inhabitants of the convent, we too oscillate between moments of immobilising dread and efficient productivity. Life occurs somewhere between these two extremes. Our routines and chores are padded with memories and prayers – our private contemplation on what the earth is becoming and what we are becoming along with it. Stone Yard Devotional binds together these seemingly unjoined instances of despair and wishfulness, and our willingness – or unwillingness – to accept the hurtle towards a Biblical end.

Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood, Sceptre/Hachette UK.