An Exquisite, Wrenching Novel of Leaving Your Life Behind

STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL, by Charlotte Wood

The mice are everywhere. Rooting through the chicken feed and the lettuce bed and the compost bucket; running up bedposts and bare legs; spewing from cars and church organs; waves of small bodies scurrying across paved roads like “a wide river of silver water.” Where there aren’t mice, there are their effects: electrical cords and bags of flour torn apart; magpies dead after eating the poisoned carcasses; a nest inside an old piano, woven from pieces of felt chewed off its hammers. The sounds of their scratching in the walls “like dried leaves falling.”

It has a ring of magical realism to it, but the rodent infestation in Charlotte Wood’s somber, exquisite seventh novel, “Stone Yard Devotional,” is nonfiction. In 2021, as the world faced the Covid pandemic, eastern Australia was contending with an additional contagion — a great surplus of mice ravaging crops and communities alike, thanks to heavier-than-normal rains and warmer temperatures that pushed the crisis further and further south.

That crisis is just one of three “visitants” to arrive on the doorstep of Wood’s unnamed narrator, an atheist in her 60s who has left behind her husband and her career as a wildlife conservationist in Sydney to live in a convent near her rural hometown in New South Wales. The second is a casket carrying the bones of Sister Jenny, a nun who disappeared 20 years earlier, after abandoning the convent to run a women’s shelter in Bangkok. The third, a childhood classmate named Helen Parry, whom the narrator once bullied, has since become a nun herself, though of the celebrity-activist kind the other nuns don’t trust.

Any one of these arrivals on its own would be enough to puncture the fantasy of “escape” the narrator seeks among this sisterhood, but together their confluence descends on the novel with the force of a biblical flood.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year (the novel was published in 2023 in Australia and England), “Stone Yard Devotional” is the diary of a person with more days behind her than ahead, tired of trying and failing to rescue the planet from man-made destruction, wanting to make her way home. Apocalypse is not so much the plot of the book as its anchor, grounding the novel’s ruminations on forgiveness and regret, on how to live and die, if not virtuously, then as harmlessly as possible.

The novel is, in many ways, an extended meditative vigil. At the convent, in place of noise and action there is what the nuns call prayer, and the narrator simply calls thinking. Short chapters often begin in the present and then digress into episodes from the narrator’s mostly stable, untroubled past. Here is her mother composting before it was cool and visiting with a blind woman in her trailer for hours at a time. Here is the narrator in a high school sewing class, ganging up on the “friendless” Helen Parry while knowing the girl is being ritually abused and abandoned by her poor, single mother. These memories appear and recede as fluidly as human thoughts, without reason or chronology or obvious connection to what’s happening outside her head (mostly emptying mouse traps, taking meals, spats between sisters, chasing government permissions to bury Sister Jenny’s remains).