Booker Prize review: The wretched of the earth in Charlotte Wood’s novel ‘Stone Yard Devotional’

The first sign of the earth trying to warn you against impeding doom is animals behaving unnaturally. They flee their habitats, trade their silence for desperate noises, even commit mass suicide when the end is near and inevitable. When mice turn up dead at the religious retreat where the unnamed protagonist checks herself into in Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, her initial disgust and unwillingness to clean up the mess is replaced by a mechanical routine of disposing of the bodies before the stench becomes even more unbearable. In this nauseating exercise, the protagonist notices rats cannibalising their kin, feeding on dead birds, and causing general mayhem. The earth upturns itself by heaving up its most undesirable pests.

The arrival

A middle-aged woman at the end of her marriage and career drives up to a desolate landscape in Australia and lodges at a Christian retreat to rethink her life and the difficult deaths of her parents. At first, she abstains from socialising – she takes meals by herself, lies flat on the floor for the lack of anything better to do – but slowly gets herself busy in the daily life of the convent. This involves cleaning, cooking, washing. The women – nuns – don’t offer...

Read more