Eco-commune and health resort are not inexact:the nuns aim for self-sufficiency as they observe the ancient religious flow and order of the days,the rituals that bring spiritual calm. All these women have chosen to come to this forlorn spot,turning their faces against the past to reflect on the detail of the present. There are no saints here,but spiritual illumination might be possible.
Charlotte Wood’s books have won prizes. Her range is extensive;she has written about creativity,ageing,cooking as well as fiction,although everything filters into the fiction of an accomplished writer. Stone Yard Devotional is daring because it looks at the obscure and therefore the difficult in the contemporary world. Difficult and obscure,but also something that commonly underpins everything we do. In a plainer world,this was called the search for meaning when the concept called God is largely absent – now probably more absent that it has ever been.
But humans yearn for something more,something not necessarily religious,but certainly spiritual. The idea of reverence? The idea of devotion to something larger than ourselves? There’s a witty paragraph where the narrator lists all the things she has “unsubscribed” from to come to this community. The lists amount to her entire external life,trying to save the planet,save the animals,save other human beings. But,for her,nothing is working in the clamour of doing good,being good. Of saving.
This time she might attend to saving herself. She will become an oblate,a person who is not a member of a religious order but one who offers themselves up in some sort of service. The community is as frail and as difficult as all human communities are,but here,in the orderliness and the desire to be at peace in the world,understanding,spiritual and practical,dawns. It also gives the woman time to think,and she increasingly thinks about her mother,whose devotion to her garden was a profound connection to her devotion for her God.
Momentously,the woman confronts her self-denial when she said she had believed that she was unafraid of death. A lie. She sees that she too will die,that everything dies,including our most precious selves. The brutality of this fact is remorselessly told and retold as the community deals with a mouse plague. Wood writes a classic horror story about plague,not microbes in this case but millions of mice in all their small,shuddering disgustingness.