Oh but Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional is fantastic. Simple story really – woman goes to a convent for a few weeks to take a rest from the State Of The World and doesn’t leave. While she’s there a few things happen: bones of a former nun are found and returned, a woman from her childhood whom she wronged by action and inaction, Helen, visits; a mouse plague besieges the convent and countryside.
Most reviews describe the book as ‘meditative’ which I take to mean ‘without much plot’ and that is true, I suppose, if we mean plot to (just) be a series of events (and yes, yes, that is definitionally plot). But for this reader it didn’t feel like things weren’t happening. Of course it could be the slow sequence of events works as formal mirror to the daily existence in a convent, or it could be that it’s meant to remind us that there need not be Big Change for there to be… big changes in a person.
Our protagonist doesn’t appear to intentionally remove herself from the world and its spiralling of human-caused destruction, but more seems to find herself through that same “inaction” going about a life of hyper-focused, task-based orientation: first I wake up. Then I feed the chickens. Then I empty mouse traps. As if in the deliberate choice to do just the next one thing there might be a means of making this world bearable.
She doesn’t believe in God, or at least doesn’t declare this to herself, and so isn’t a nun herself – a distinction she makes at several points – she is instead something of an unintentional objector to the rest of the world. It’s not that she’s withdrawing from modernity for technological reasons (though since reading this one I’ve once again renewed my commitment to quitting my phone addiction) more a moral objection to her own complicity and inability to make change.
Okay so there’s all of that but for me the core of the book is questions of forgiveness: what does it mean to forgive someone? How might you do it (do you just decide and then do the ‘work’ of forgiveness)? What right do you have to ask for/demand forgiveness? What do you need to do to earn it? How do we forgive between individuals, among groups and from humanity to the earth? What reparation are required, if any, in the work and process? Can forgiveness be exacted without this work of repair? How grievous the harm before something is unforgiveable? How might we forgive ourselves even if/if those we seek forgiveness from refuse us?
Oh the book does So Much to ask and explore (without resolution, I think) these questions. Made for a lovely patio discuss with A. with the only conclusion that there might be something distinct between the feeling of forgiveness and the verb of it. And something distinct between the act of repair and the forgiveness that might, or might not, follow.
Enthusiastic recommendation of this one.
Literary Vice 