Stone Yard Devotional: A Novel (Random House Large Print)

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood is a lovely, quiet book about our all-too-fragile human condition, in which, despite all our best human efforts, we have little power to alleviate or mitigate the loss, hurt, pain, suffering, and misunderstandings we experience and inflict upon each other. What little we can do matters, but it takes a special sensitivity for us to notice and thereby sense those tiny comforts. And sadly, most of us, wrapped up in our little worlds, don't take the time or have the capacity to take what comforts are extended to us. The irony in the text is that almost any spiritual community is a surefire way to disable the small acts we can take to ease others' suffering. It isn't the community or the dogma or the practice that enables real acts of solace or forgiveness; it is the rare and precious time we take away from the world of “getting and Spending” that allows us the time to reflect, notice, and accept those moments of human suffering and tinier acts of human kindness. Like our meager moves towards forgiveness and solace for others, Wood’s language is a diary-like confessional, spare at times and rich in subtlety at others.

A tricky one to review and I feel this book could be polarising amongst our Book Group members. A deeply reflective, gentle, and quiet book that reads more like a memoir than a work of fiction. The main character (a woman who is never named) chooses to step out of the modern world and moves in with a small monastery of nuns in a remote part of Australia, close to where she grew up. Initially it appears this was for some temporary solace after the death of her mother and disintegration of her marriage. However, she ends up residing there permanently and foregoes capitalism for a life of relatively isolated introspection. The prose is beautiful and peaceful and gives the reader insight into replacing a life full of news, noise and chaos of the world with one of ritual, simplistic living and time to gently sift through ones life memories and thoughts without distraction. Time out is not an easy thing to do in the world we live in.

My first words upon finishing this book were “what an odd book.” They don’t mean I didn’t like it, but it was meditative, small and simple and so vast at once. A book about memory, misperceptions, love and loss, and the process of forgiveness or deciding not to forgive. I am just unsure what to make of it.

Slow start, but filled out into a reflective, thoughtful read

It is often brutal, and the language can at times seem sparse. Wood’s teased the reader with a little humour, mostly laughing at the absurdity of difficult situations. I came to admire Helen Parry. I still prefer her novel ‘The Natural Way of Things.”