Nothing trivial, nothing insincere about ‘Stone Yard Devotional’

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In an interview published on the Booker Prize website, Australian writer Charlotte Wood offers a key insight to unlocking her unusual and absorbing novel, Stone Yard Devotional, shortlisted for the 2024 prize earlier this week. “I wanted nothing trivial, nothing insincere in this book," she says, taking a cue from the American master, Saul Bellow.

Her aim was to “master stillness in the midst of chaos", and that’s what she achieves beautifully by taking the reader into the mind of her unnamed protagonist, a woman who gives up her life in Sydney to retreat to a remote abbey in New South Wales. The blurb attributes this decision to “burnout", but there is more to it than can be pathologised. Certainly, it’s far from a fad that can be romanticised on social media.

“You do not announce on Facebook that you, an atheist, are leaving your job and your home and your husband to join a cloistered religious community," she admits wryly. Rather, her departure from the mainstream is triggered by a malaise that’s peculiar to life in the Anthropocene Age. As a conservationist who strove to protect endangered species, the narrator feels it more than others.

“Every minuscule action after waking means slurping up resources, expelling waste, destroying habitat, causing ruptures of some other kind," she explains in the book. “Whereas staying still, suspended in time like these women, does the opposite. (The sisters) are doing no harm." As it turns out, her faith in the benign impact of the community is misplaced.