Nuns, Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote in her historical novel The Corner That Held Them, set in a 14th-century English convent, are “beings who are, in any case, much less interesting when seen from above than when studied sideways.” The nun at the center of Australian writer Charlotte Wood’s new novel, the 2024 Booker Prize-shortlisted Stone Yard Devotional, is interesting from all angles and in all narrative timeframes. Moreover, the convent she comes to call home takes the form of a sanctuary in which she reflects on the world and the life she left behind — and contemplates with growing unease the arrival of a person from her past.
The novel gets off to something of a false start. When we first meet Wood’s unnamed heroine and narrator, she is turning up at the door of a convent on the barren, windswept Monaro plains of New South Wales. She grew up around here and has returned to stay in the convent’s guest house — not for any religious purpose (she confesses to being an atheist), but rather for a short respite from her many pressures: the hectic pace of life in Sydney, a crumbling marriage, and deep-seated frustration at not being able to implement constructive change as an environmental conservationist. For her, this retreat is an “escape,” a place for recharging and making decisions about her future. And, she adds, “Crying. Hiding.”
The woman endures a cold room and mediocre food. She listens to “biblical mumbo jumbo.” However, gradually, she becomes entranced and “tranquillised” by the sisters’ songs, readings, and rituals during Lauds, Vespers, Middle Hour, and the Lectio Divina — so much so that when she finally leaves, it is only a temporary departure.
From here, Wood fast-forwards four years. Her protagonist has turned her back on her job, marriage, and friends and made this convent her fixed abode. Her succession of sacrifices has proved damaging: “I know this much,” she says, “everyone here has hurt someone by coming.” She gets on with her new life regardless. Still distanced from God, she spends her days making herself useful in a “pleasant, rhythmic, mindless industry” — preparing meals, tending the vegetable garden, cleaning, and organizing — all the time relishing her newfound, hard-won inner peace.
However, outside forces begin threatening to shatter that calm and disrupt the smooth running of the convent. A large-scale drought brings about an infestation of mice, and as the nuns band together to stamp them out, a grim realization takes hold that they are fighting a losing battle. Extreme weather elsewhere gives rise to another grisly discovery. Floods in Bangkok have felled a tree, and in its roots have been found the bones of a nun who, two decades ago, went missing and was presumed murdered. The skeletal remains of Sister Jenny are to be transported back to the convent for burial.
As if this weren’t unnerving enough, the narrator learns that the nun tasked with bringing the bones is Helen Parry. One of the sisters calls her “that celebrity nun,” for Parry is a climate activist who has made a name for herself and created headlines through a series of radical campaigns and vocal protests about human rights and the plight of the planet. However, our narrator has a personal connection with Parry. Decades ago, the pair went to the same high school, and the narrator was part of a gang, later a “shrieking mob,” that routinely bullied Parry. Since then, Parry has grown strong and stood up for what she believes in, while her erstwhile tormentor has been filled with doubt and racked with remorse. Can her cloistered confines still offer her the comfort and sense of belonging that she craves?
This is Wood’s seventh novel and, at least on the surface, her most understated. There is little in the way of the plot. The prose is largely spare, and dialogue is scant. Most of the characters are only faintly adumbrated. Unlike her last novel, 2019’s The Weekend, which scrutinized the fraught friendship of a group of 70-something women, Wood is uninterested in the interplay between her protagonist and the other nuns. Her character simply carries out her day-to-day duties while attempting to cope with the obstacles that come her way.
None of which sounds particularly riveting. And yet, Wood ensures we remain fully absorbed. She suffuses her narrative with foreboding: a piano keeps the woman awake at night (“It was a wrong and menacing sound, like someone drunk or ill collapsing over the keys”), and Parry outstays her welcome and causes disquiet by stalking the corridors “like a trapped animal.” Occasionally, the woman displays a worrying state of mind. “Sometimes,” she admits, “I want to stand up, overturn the tables, lock the doors, flick a match, and burn this place to the ground with all of us in it.”
The mouse plague comes close to sending her over the edge. Wood’s depiction of a situation spiraling out of control is masterly. The crisis is all the more chilling for unfolding in a claustrophobic environment. Wood articulates the horror of countless mice swarming and multiplying, leaping and climbing, burrowing into clothes and furniture, and eating one another. The nuns keep devising new methods to kill them (“We would find ways to atone”) and are then faced with the problem of how to bury large quantities of corpses — corpses that are still coming in thick and fast.
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Wood also powers her narrative by having her protagonist replay memories — many of them dark — of her rural childhood. She recalls senseless murders, a terminal illness, cruelty toward a teacher, and the ordeals of Vietnamese refugees. While dwelling on the past or meditating in the present, she professes that much eludes her: “the subterranean lives of families,” her mother’s “secret self,” and, of course, God’s mysterious ways.
However, it is through the woman’s soul-searching and joined-up thinking that this remarkable novel derives its potency. The more the woman quests for meaning and understanding, the more invested we become in her. A light account of a journey into servitude and solitude soon transforms into a profound study of faith, grief, guilt, and forgiveness.
Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.