Simplicity & austerity: ‘Stone Yard Devotional’ by Charlotte Wood

For some reason, I had resisted picking up a copy of Charlotte Wood’s 2024 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, though I had read and admired her earlier works such as The Weekend and The Natural Way of Things.

A contemplative work, about a middle-aged woman seeking solace in a religious community on the sparse Monaro Plains of southeastern NSW? It sounded too quiet, too contemplative, too…austere.

It is indeed all of those things.

The setting, after all, hardly invites images of lush rolling pastures. The Monaro, frequently drought-affected, frost-bitten in winter, is a harsh environment at the best of times. The region has its own appeal but it is definitely an austere kind of beauty.

And the retreat at which the unnamed narrator arrives at the novel’s opening is an unembellished place where routine and simplicity prevail.

The reader is privy to the inner life of the narrator so that we experience these details through her eyes and live the day-to-day there with her.

Her reasons for being there are just hinted at. Difficulties in her marriage. Burnout from a demanding job in the not-for-profit environmental sector, facing down environmental crises on a daily basis. Overwhelm from the modern world’s too-busy pace.

Understandable that she should want to escape all that for a while.

It would be a spoiler, actually, to say much more about what happens during her time there.

Except that the little religious backwater is in reality both a haven from and a microcosm of the outside world. The narrator has plenty of time to examine her own impulses and reactions to the daily irritations and petty doings of the community; but there are broader themes at play here too.

Memories of shameful episodes from childhood.
An unsolved crime from years before.
Is it possible to both admire and dislike someone?
Environmental impacts at the local level.
Faith and prayer.

Our Simone once took me to task over my ‘sneering’ about prayer. My notion of prayer was juvenile: forget this telephone line to God bullshit, she snapped, hot with impatience. It wasn’t even about God, she said, which I thought must surely be blasphemous. Praying was a way to interrupt your own habitual thinking, she told me. It’s admitting yourself into otherness, cracking open your prejudices. It’s not chitchat; it’s hard labour.
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The novel is full of snippets of insights, of struggle, of contradictions, as the narrator tries to square her very humanness with the experience of living in a community dedicated to the religious. In the end, I suppose, what we see is the very humanity of organised religion. It is, after all, a very human construct and endeavour.

So despite my earlier resistance, I was pleased to read this book and to give myself over to the very interior nature of its story. From a novel told from within one one person’s head and within such a small setting, it has some big ideas to think about.

Stone Yard Devotional was published by Allen & Unwin in 2024