The Piano was abuzz with a chattering crowd, drinks in hand, looking forward to a Friday evening spent with Charlotte Wood. We would hear her in conversation with Emily Perkins, who is no slouch herself, to say the least. Emily’s book Lioness won the Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2024 Ockham Book Awards. We were set to hear all about Wood’s latest novel Stone Yard Devotional, shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Wood needs no introduction, although Perkins did kindly give us one. As the author of seven novels and three non-fiction books on the creative process, Wood demonstrates her profound yet wry observations of human behaviour and our inner lives, her novels lauded by countless glowing reviews, and Stone Yard Devotional is no exception. It follows an atheist woman who leaves her marriage and career to become an oblate, in a small monastic community in rural New South Wales. Pressure builds beneath the surface of idyll, culminating in three key spiritual visitations which pose disturbing questions.
What better way to become more acquainted with Wood’s novel than to hear a passage read by the woman herself? Charlotte read from a chapter early in the novel, her lilting tone leading me to agree with Perkins “I could listen to her reading the phone book”. This early chapter led Perkins to ask the question – what actually IS an oblate? For those of us who had limited experience with life in a nunnery, we learned that an oblate, also known as a lay sister, is someone who spends a lot of time with nuns but isn’t a nun themselves (also applicable to monks). The thoughts of our protagonist, said oblate, are illustrated beautifully with Wood’s tone - wry yet respectful of the sheer gravitas of her surroundings.
Perkins, her comfortable stance demonstrating the pair’s existing friendship, asks Wood how she arrived at such a tone. Charlotte admitted this book was the result of a weird set of circumstances during the pandemic. She’s sad it’ll never happen again- it comes as no surprise that Charlotte is just as witty as her protagonist. It’s interesting that Wood herself had a Catholic upbringing but “ditched”, yet her novel follows an atheist who seeks to retreat into a convent. Her faith in the world had run dry, her once fervent environmental activism halted by a wall of despair. That drew parallels to Charlotte’s experience of lockdown, which like our own, wiped all certainties. Her initial writing had become more serious, so that gravitas needed to somehow blend with her quintessential humour.
The other notable aspect of Wood’s tone was how pared back it was. She wanted nothing trivial, keeping the words of WB Yeats front of mind “I am sick of the impulse to just tell the reader”. That minimalism created a spaciousness which I found unbelievably refreshing to read. Perkins wanted to know if Wood found adopting Yeat’s dictum difficult - receiving a decisive “Yes” as an answer. Yet it was fun, too - clearly Wood enjoys a challenge. Setting a novel in such silence and stasis may have been a shot in the foot for most of us - but Charlotte Wood is decidedly in a league of her own.
Perkins understood that another character we were curious to hear more about was Sister Helen Parry. Prefacing she does very little research, amid chuckles throughout the audience, Wood describes her as a ‘rogue nun’. She mentions drawing from examples of nuns experiencing ‘celebrity’, such as Sister Brigid Arthur, who teamed up with eight teenagers to win a climate case that stopped an Australian coal mine. Sister Helen Parry, however, had her plans for activism blocked by the onset of lockdown, forced to isolate within the remote convent instead. Naturally, such a “rabble-rouser” did not gel with the other nuns, bearing reminders of society to a group who had chosen to leave it. Wood astutely observed that Parry’s somewhat abrasive personality was not so different from many movers and shakers in real life. Moving tirelessly against the grain for the greater good often requires being of a very different personality to the ‘herd’.
This led Perkins to probe what had led Wood to be “not interested in writing pleasing women”. Attending a Catholic school had taught Charlotte that “God doesn’t care about girls”. A saint frequently evangelised at school was St Maria Goretti, an eleven-year-old girl who, as she lay dying, forgave the man who attempted to rape her and then stabbed her to death. Her murderer was then granted forgiveness from her mother as well, and Wood couldn’t follow the way this female submission was venerated throughout Catholicism. Whilst that had been a catalyst in Wood's refusal to add to the mountain of compliant portrayals of women, she did stipulate that there are also some upstanding members of the Catholic Church. Wood felt it was important to allow yourself to allow opposites to be simultaneously true, and Perkins nodded, adding that we need more of that as a society.
Next, Perkins moved to the topic many of us had been waiting for - mice. Stone Yard Devotional sees the convent plagued by mice, leaving the Sisters to discuss how to deal with it whilst following their ‘do no harm’ doctrine. Wood was inspired by a mouse plague in New South Wales at the time of writing, leading her to make the progressive, if insane, decision to stay on a plagued friend’s farm for ‘research’. When Wood was told the piano had suddenly started playing from hundreds of tiny paws, she knew she had to emulate such ghostly horror in her writing. Eventually, Wood realised she couldn’t keep jumping on chairs, and within twenty-four hours she was casually stomping on them as she chatted to her friend on the couch. This change of heart was comparable to the nuns weighing up that whilst regarding something as vermin may be subjective, the damage inflicted by the mice was very objective, with their munching of appliances, wires, and concrete footings. The demand to be moral to rodents does alter when competing with the demand to prevent your house from collapsing.
Lastly, the parallels between the novel’s calamities and biblical events is a theme Wood shares in her own life, particularly towards the governmental approach to climate change. Wood shares the despair of her protagonist, as every month there seems to be a new environmental disaster in Australia, be it bush fires, floods or droughts. After each event occurs, she is understandably affronted when people exclaim ‘We can't believe it!’ ‘It’s the hottest / driest / wettest __insert month__ on record!’ “Of course!” Wood cries “and it’s only going to get worse”. Wood comments on how inefficient hope is in this current climate. Hope isn’t going to save us, but courage might. I expect Wood’s book will contribute to that.
Catherine
He Hononga | Connection, Ground floor, Tūranga
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