Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional is a story of a woman’s seclusion, claustrophobia and the irredeemable tragedies of life. Known as one of Australia’s most ‘original and provocative writers’ of the contemporary times, Wood writes about the troubled world and what it would be like to run away from it.
Set in a small town, the novel begins with the narrator visiting her parents’ graves and then moving into a retreat run by sisters and nuns. We follow her through the first four days of settling in and being introduced to her fellow inmates who are engaging in a ‘slow, feminine submission’ to Christ. The story then jumps to four years later. Now, the middle-aged woman has finally adjusted to the eeriness of the place. The lockdown orders have been issued, but they discover that one of the sisters who was missing from the community back in the 1980s is dead and her bones have to be returned for a burial. And then there is a plague at their residence giving them new horrors to deal with.
The story bears a sense of disquiet that spills through Wood’s haunting and evocative writing. Less dialogues, more immersion through thick descriptions is what the author employs to situate the reader into the mind of her narrator. The claustrophobia that the middle-aged woman feels is made visceral through terror of the ‘mice busily at work, gnawing at the dove’s face’ and memories of the life she ran away from. The rise and fall in the beginning of the chapters, the pacy mid-section and the slow end is a structure that works well for the narrative. It keeps the readers invested, and ensures that the suspense remains in the wake of rising intensity. It is in the league of a novel like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca where the unnamed woman enters the house haunted by her husband’s past life. The religious community is the protagonist’s Manderley, except it is infested by rats instead of rhododendrons. The irony of this disquiet is what works for the novel.
Wood’s characters are amusing. While the middle-aged woman takes centrestage, her secondary characters are no less. They appear with a fervour and life of their own that disrupt both the protagonist and the plot. By choosing the trope of isolation for her characters, Wood has written serious, but humorous scenes and character sketches that remind one of Iris Murdoch’s palliative novel, The Unicorn.
The narrator—in relation to an outsider—realises, ‘I think to Anita we remain a foreign species. And why not? We’ve done it deliberately; made ourselves foreign to ordinary life.’ Such moments when the narrator accepts a ‘we’-ness with her fellow inmates is extraordinarily shown as tragedies that befall the community. This sense of belonging heightens especially when an outsider with whom the protagonist has had a horrible past, joins the retreat. Wood explores the community versus individual debate to uncover the flaws of such dualistic thought.
Particular segues in the novel are clunky. Like when she’s talking about the protagonist’s present life, and then makes a sudden shift to her memories. While these make for interesting subplots, the reader is left wondering if the transition was not misplaced. It often makes one feel lost in the labyrinth of the narrator’s memories. One memory isn’t over, yet another set of characters are introduced for the reader to connect with. The only place where the spiralling works is when the narrator recalls her time with her mother and her schooldays. The readers get to see a whole new dimension to the protagonist when sometimes harsh, sometimes kind, sometimes unnerving memories are brought to the fore. It gives a peek into her life before she set foot in the religious community.
Wood’s nomination to the Booker Prize is a needed step to reassert the space for fiction that is raw, haunting and bursts with creativity and imagination. There is an immersive setting at the turn of every page, and it is layered with symbols to give it a quirky tone. There are conflicts and emotions embedded in a language that certainly makes the reading experience better, if not eventful. Stone Yard Devotional deserves to move ahead into the shortlist simply for being a novel that unsettles its reader, both by its evocative thoughts and its originality.
Stone Yard Devotional
By: Charlotte Wood
Publisher: Hachette
Pages: 293
Price: Rs 799