Book Review: Stoneyard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

Today I review a new Australian novel.

This novel is set in a Catholic community in the Monaro Plains, south east of Sydney. The weary first person narrator, separated from her husband, moves there from Sydney, initially for a short-term retreat. Having left and returned home, she later returns permanently.

The most fascinating thing about Stoneyard Devotional is the dry, unemotional, one might almost say ‘drained’ voice of the narrator, which is profoundly compelling.

I initially felt that I perfectly understood her desire to retreat to this quiet, uneventful place, observing the rhythm of the nuns as day-by-day they carry out the various elements of the ‘divine office’. Yet the narrator is avowedly atheist, still in grief for the death of her parents years before, and she is following this rhythm almost out of a sense of numb despair.  The atmosphere of the novel captivated me, against all reason, you might say, with the flatness of the landscape, the unsentimental observations of the daily routine, and the sheer repetitiveness of the routine.

The narrator intersperses her account with continuous memories of her past life, and I felt these to be wholly convincing; past events do indeed intercede in this way, especially if you choose to go aside from your life of busy-ness and ‘doing’ for a time of retreat. Foremost in her memories seems to be a past schoolmate called Helen Parry who haunts her because Helen was seen as an oddball, treated cruelly by her contemporaries, and the narrator numbers herself among those who abused her. Then, as luck would have it (and often does) Helen Parry comes into her life again and arrives to spend time at the community awaiting the arrival of the bones of a murdered nun, her former friend, for reburial at ‘Stoneyard’.

From this point on I became more and more aware of the narrator’s unquenchable sense of guilt; yet Helen Parry herself seems to have forgotten her and considers the cruellest incident at school almost to be disregarded. I became drawn in by the question of ‘when will the narrator actually open up to Helen and have a proper talk with her and resolve this burden of misunderstanding and guilt?’ The answer to that lies ahead for the reader. I kept turning the pages driven by a quest to truly understand both the narrator and Helen, all through a horrific plague of mice which afflicts the community and to which the author devotes some of her most detailed and graphic descriptions.

A remarkable novel which somehow defies all conventional understanding of such literary devices as ‘high emotional stakes,’ ‘suspense’ or ‘the black moment’ in story structure and yet retains its strange power and truthfulness.

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About me

I live in Warwickshire, a county in central England, just south of Birmingham, together with my husband and son; and my daughter currently lives and works in Australia.

I was born and brought up in Orpington, a town on the southeastern edge of London. My first job was as a production secretary with the BBC. Later I lived for five years in Australia before returning to live and work in England.

My published output includes two novels Mystical Circles and A Passionate Spirit, and four highly illustrated nonfiction books Paranormal Warwickshire, Illustrated Tales of Warwickshire, A-Z of Warwick and Paranormal Gloucestershire.