Booker Prize finalist: Inspired or insipid? Stone Yard Devotional contemplates uncertainty
Charlotte Wood’s slow epistolary novel invites readers to sit with ambiguity, but in doing so, dims its own luminosity
NOTHING much happens in Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional in the sense of a plot. Instead, the action in this Booker Prize-shortlisted novel is largely cerebral, with intense introspection set within an abbey in Australia’s Monaro region.
The middle-aged protagonist is no nun. She doesn’t even believe in God. Her journey to the abbey’s retreat house starts as an escape from her city life, her failing marriage, and her work in species conservation. That visit turns into another, and another – until one day she does not leave. There, she cooks for the nuns and tends to the farm animals, losing herself in the routine of domestic demands and prayers.
The women of the abbey, much like the narrator, have chosen to separate themselves from society. The nuns pray against “evils” in a society they do not participate in – of problems that, one could argue, they have no direct knowledge of.
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