This story of a woman retreating from the world to a convent in New South Wales considers guilt, forgiveness and human connection
hat are we going to do about global heating, about mass extinction, about our rivers? What ability do we have to change things, now that power lies mostly in the hands of unaccountable corporations and shameless demagogues? Is there even any point in trying? The narrator of Stone Yard Devotional, who has been working in species conservation, chooses that most seductive solution – despair.
There is a tradition of novelists using the pressure-cooker environment of a convent for thought experiments or satire. Rumer Godden took on the contradictions of colonialism in Black Narcissus. Muriel Spark did Watergate in habits for. But the nuns at Stone Yard are too busy keeping everything spruce and orderly to go in for wire taps or erotic shenanigans. The pressure here comes from outside, in the shape of three arrivals.
The bones are accompanied by their most famous sister, a climate activist called Helen Parry, whose presence pulls into the convent all the noise of the world the narrator has tried to leave behind. The narrator had known Parry as a child when they were at school together. She’d seen her being terribly bullied and been nagged by guilt for her part in it. But the adult Parry is invulnerable, sure of herself, effective. A broken-hearted child has become a whole-hearted campaigner.
The irony of the narrator turning to a convent in despair is that for Catholics despair is the unforgivable sin. In interviews Wood has referred to these three incidents – the bones, the mice, the return of Parry – as “visitations”, as if they were tests, like the temptations in the desert.
“Attention,” said Simone Weil, “is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Wood is a writer of the most intense attention. Everything here – the way mice move, the way two women pass each other a confiding look, the way a hero can love the world but also be brusque and inconsiderate to those around them – it all rings true. It’s the story of a small group of people in a tiny town, but its resonance is global. This is a powerful, generous book.
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