Sticky Velvet Wings

The mouse plague​ in Queensland and New South Wales in 2020-21 was overshadowed by Covid-19. But the plague within the plague was no small matter. Heavy rain after a long drought meant bumper grain crops, which colonies of mice devastated. The use of poison (zinc phosphide coated on wheat and scattered around pastures) had little effect: there were always more mice. Residents suffered no less than farmers, using traps, sticky paper and buckets of water tinged with peanut butter to keep mice from overrunning their homes. Then there were the corpses to dispose of – and the smell.

In Charlotte Wood’s latest novel, a group of nuns in the Australian outback are initially reluctant to kill mice: their credo is ‘do no harm.’ The unnamed narrator is reluctant too: she used to work at an endangered species rescue centre, and thinks it ‘morally appalling’ to kill ‘such tiny, seemingly defenceless creatures’. Still, with their ‘stink, their rapaciousness and skittering feet’, the mice are a terrible pest, chewing through wiring and nesting in the piano (thereby setting off discordant music, ‘like someone drunk or ill collapsing over the keys’). Traps in the kitchen go off every fifteen minutes; sometimes the dead mouse will have its head chewed off by other mice. ‘Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous’? Au contraire. It’s a murine horror show. A pit has to be excavated with a digger because a trench can’t contain all the corpses, barrowfuls of them every day.

No less than the mice, the unnamed narrator is an intruder. She describes herself as an atheist, dismisses religious feeling as ‘neuroelectric misfire’ and feels nauseated by the sisters’ reverence for Jesus, ‘as if they’re talking about some teen idol crush’. Though raised Catholic, she deplores the ‘savagery’ of the Catholic Church for its treatment of unmarried mothers and its tolerance of child abuse. But on a guest visit to the convent, which looks more like a health resort or eco-commune, she feels ‘drenched in a weird tranquillity so deep it puts a stop to thought … In the contemporary world, this kind of stillness feels radical. Illicit.’ She loves the unhurriedness and the routines: Lauds, Middle Hour, Vespers. It’s as though she’s being stripped down to bedrock. Nothing is asked of her, whereas work has demanded too much. Without warning, she quits her job, unsubscribes from the mailing lists of the charities she has supported and moves into one of the guest cabins on the convent’s grounds.

She has also walked out on her husband, Alex, of whom we learn little, only that he’s wounded by her abandonment. Friends and colleagues are angry with her for disappearing without notice and for deserting the environmentalist cause. She stops reading their letters. ‘Everyone here has hurt someone by coming’; one nun has left behind two teenage children. The consolation is community life, which isn’t simple or without friction, but is strangely uplifting: ‘After so many years of living in cities, the endlessness of the night sky here pours a wild, brilliant vertigo into me.’

The nuns she’s surrounded by – Simone, Bonaventure, Sissy, Carmel, Dolores, Josephine – aren’t altogether saintly, but she engages with them; she may have withdrawn from society but she’s not a recluse. It helps that she’s familiar with the bleakly beautiful Monaro landscape, having grown up nearby. She visits her parents’ graves (‘My inability to get over my parents’ deaths has been a source of lifelong shame to me’), finds memories coming back (‘Place names I thought I’d forgotten returned to me one by one … like beads on a rosary’) and is reunited with people she knew at secondary school, including the methodical Richard Gittens. Although male and an outsider, he works devotedly for the community and shares its values, unlike his wife, who thinks the way the nuns live is ‘unnatural’. The novel gives no credence to that prejudice: the stereotypes of convent life as a hotbed of lunacy and lesbianism are dispelled, if only by never appearing.

To begin with, Stone Yard Devotional poses as a daybook. And though the chronology eases up, it remains intimate and first-hand. ‘Nobody will read this but me,’ the narrator says, which might be true if it were a diary, not a novel shortlisted for the Booker Prize. As the story of a woman in retreat, it can afford to be inward-looking, with low-key daily struggle the thread: how to raise money, organise food, trap mice and put up with nuns who annoy you. But two arrivals, along with the mice, promise a dramatic shake-up. The first is the return of the bones belonging to Sister Jenny, who after moving to Bangkok was murdered there, it seems by an American priest; years on, her remains have just been found, after a flood, and will be flown back for burial. Simone and Bonaventure, close friends of Jenny, are desperate for this to happen on community land but fear the council won’t grant permission.

For the narrator, the scarier ‘frisson of approaching change’ comes from the woman accompanying the bones, Sister Helen Parry. Rangy, overbearing and beloved of the media for her radical campaigning zeal, she intimidates the other nuns, who are grateful that she spends most of her time alone, in separate quarters, unable to travel because of Covid but constantly busy with video calls and online meetings. The narrator has even more reason to be fearful, since she was part of a group of girls who bullied Helen at school, eventually beating her up so badly that she never returned. In those days Helen, living in a council flat with an angry mother who whipped her with an electric kettle cord, was dirty, dishevelled and acne-ridden. Now she’s an activist poster girl, casually dressed (sweatshirt, jeans, enormous sunglasses, no veil) and with a ‘calm entitlement’. She acts as if the world owes her and, given her awful childhood, perhaps it does.

On one level, Helen is an alter ego, the woman the narrator failed to become, a ‘celebrity nun’ rather than a nameless nonentity. The novel’s structure creates the expectation of a showdown, perhaps even of vengeance for the shameful episode from school, which Helen claims to have forgotten (‘for me, that day was nothing’) but which haunts the narrator. A couple of encounters do throw them together, when they’re swimming in a dam and again when they’re out jogging. But there’s no big finale, only a quiet epiphany that ends with Helen telling her: ‘I need you to know that I loved my mother, and she – tried, as much as she was able, to love me.’

Retreat also forces the narrator to reappraise her own mother, a humanitarian fundraiser, befriender of refugees and florist who ‘smelled of garden’, someone she didn’t appreciate as fully as she should have: ‘How rare such a simple and powerful trust had been. I wished again that I had been able to say any of this to her when she lived.’ Despite the care she gave her mother when she was dying, the narrator can’t forgive herself for not doing more: ‘I wish, for the thousandth time that I had been older than I was when she fell ill. I feel sure more maturity would have brought with it some greater capacity to help her than I had.’ Wood was in her twenties when her own mother died and has called this her most personal book. It’s as much about mothers as sisterhood.

It’s also the third novel in a row in which Wood focuses on a group of women cloistered away from home. In The Natural Way of Things (2016) there are ten of them, each drugged and abducted after a sexual encounter with a powerful man which has somehow offended the patriarchy. Enclosed by a lethal electric fence, ‘in the baking soundless grounds of a girls’ prison made out of shearers’ kennels in the middle of fucking nowhere’, they’re under the control of three men: the vicious Boncer, the self-absorbed Teddy and the Godot-like Hardings who never shows up. In The Weekend (2019) the group is composed of three women in their seventies who spend Christmas at the beach house of their friend Sylvie, who died a year before. Lost without her, they struggle to stay close. The only man in The Weekend, Gillespie, is no less obnoxious than Boncer and Teddy, whom the captive girls deplore as typical of their gender: ‘It was men who started wars, who did the world’s killing and raping and maiming.’ Wood expected her assault on misogyny to land her in trouble, but she got away with it because, she joked, men’s rights activists don’t read literary fiction. Richard, in Stone Yard Devotional, will raise no hackles: the narrator considers him decent, and there’s no reason to think her unreliable.

In The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend, point of view switches between the main characters: it’s third-person but internal. However hard one woman strains to understand and empathise with another, however feminist her allegiance, she is locked inside her own head. Stone Yard Devotional is written in the first person and in that respect seems to have arrived where Wood’s previous novels were headed. The mode is concentratedly self-searching: a woman without hope, disaffected with work and the world, has withdrawn to live in a different way and perhaps to find herself. Yet the novel isn’t secluded. The world keeps breaking in. And the narrator is someone who notices things, in minute detail: ‘attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,’ she says, quoting Simone Weil. According to the other Simone, the principal nun in the monastery, prayer is a way of ‘admitting yourself into otherness … it’s hard labour.’ In attending to otherness the narrator has a keen eye for birds and beasts: a dead baby chick, ‘icy cold and light as a ping-pong ball’, furred bogong moths with their ‘sticky velvet wings’, a possum scuffling high in the trees, a ‘prehistoric granite-coloured’ goanna, zinging grasshoppers, the ‘muffled flapping’ of a cockatoo, delicate new lambs (‘the feel of a poddy lamb’s skinny back is like running your hand up the wrinkles in your sock’). The narrator may have left her job, but the novel hasn’t given up on environmentalism – and nor, it turns out, has she.

What’s attractive about Stone Yard Devotional is that it’s unsure, or won’t flag up, what it’s about. For Wood, being in charge means going where she doesn’t expect to go, away from the surtext. The novel has a kind of homely mystery. Has the narrator really ‘disappeared’? No, it’s equally possible she’s now arriving at herself. Is she irreligious? No, her attachment to the natural world and her solidarity with the sisterhood are resolute. Is the cataclysm of leaving her job, husband, friends and colleagues a thing of the past, now she has settled in a new community? No, because the past can’t ever be banished:

I used to think there was a ‘before’ and ‘after’ most things that happen to a person; that a fence of time and space could separate even quite catastrophic experience from the ordinary whole of life. But now I know that with a great devastation of some kind, there is no before or after. Even when the commotion of crisis has settled, it’s still there.

Still there for the narrator is a preoccupation with violence and death. It began in childhood when she read stories of saints, in which girls endured stabbing, eye-gouging, drowning and rape in order to become martyrs. And she’s now besieged by memories of violence and murder: a boy who shot his parents, a teenage girl’s death from anorexia, a mother killed in a road accident, a close friend who died from cancer, a couple of suicides. A cruder novel would attribute all of this to the vicious world she left behind and sanctify the nuns’ hideaway. Stone Yard Devotional resists that. Still, there’s sympathy for the father of the anorexic victim when he says that his daughter’s problem wasn’t poor self-esteem or a distorted body image but a ‘revulsion for capitalism, for the consumption responsible for the unprecedented collapse of ecosystems, the galloping extinctions’.

In lauding austerity the novel is itself austere, even when it comes to winding things up. Where The Weekend had a big pay-off, with its three women – Jude, Wendy and Adele – all shockingly humiliated, Stone Yard Devotional ends quietly, with a passage about composting and how anything that has lived can make itself useful in death. There are plot resolutions of a kind – the mouse plague abates – but no dramatic finale for the narrator, who’s still raking over old coals, thinking things through, ‘sitting with questions that are sometimes never answered’.

Over the past decade Wood’s versatility has taken her from the dystopian The Natural Way of Things through the comic The Weekend to the meditative monasticism of Stone Yard Devotional. Themes do recur: animals, church, climate change. But she doesn’t repeat herself. And though she refrained from calling her novel Of Mice and Women, no one has written so well about rodents.