Of Mice and Nuns

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood (Sceptre, 2024)

Reviewed by Sarah Selden

In his 2014 book The Church of Mercy: A Vision for the Church, the late Pope Francis wrote “Situations can change; people can change. Be the first to seek to bring good. Do not grow accustomed to evil, but defeat it with good” (119). In an increasingly complex and interconnected world, just what it means to be good and do good is increasingly difficult to ascertain. Are the small acts of serving your neighbor enough to defeat evil? Or does one need to affect change on a global scale in order to truly “do good”?  Pope Francis lived a life marked by both: he worked as a janitor in his early life before becoming most known for his concern for the poor through his work in the villa miseria when he was the Auxiliary Bishop of Buenos Aires. These questions about what it means to do good also echo throughout Charlotte Wood’s 2024 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel Stone Yard Devotional.

Set in Australia in late 2019-2021, the novel is written in the form of a first-person “devotional.” It follows the story of an unnamed narrator who, before the pandemic begins, has elected to leave her previous life behind. Before making this choice, she worked for an NGO as a climate activist alongside her husband, Alex. At the novel’s outset, the narrator is taking a break from her work and is supposedly planning to join Alex in London for their next project very soon. In the meantime, she is going to spend a few days at a convent near her childhood home in New South Wales, where she hopes to have time to work through some of the hopelessness she feels in relation to her job and marriage. The novel does not go into much detail about what caused this desire for respite, but it can be inferred that the scale of the climate crisis and the ineffectiveness of her organization’s efforts have caused her to give up.

As planned, the narrator stays at the convent for five days, sleeping, snacking, and drinking wine in her cabin, mostly avoiding the nuns. On the fifth day of her visit, she prepares to leave, writing “Before getting in the car I walk up a path into a patch of bush and see a lyrebird poking and digging at the side of the track. I stand for ages and watch it. It seems completely unperturbed by my presence” (36). She then leaves the nunnery without fanfare, leaving the reader with this seemingly insignificant image as Part I of the novel draws to a close.

Part II begins with a surprising shift that raises more questions than it answers. It opens with the narrator back at the convent. It seems that now she has been living there as a sister for several months. The novel gives no details as to how she returned, how or why she took vows as a self-proclaimed agnostic, or what happened to her marriage. Her devotional picks up after she has worked through all these details and begun her life anew, just as the pandemic is also beginning. She starts to build relationships with the other nuns, most notably Bonaventure, the abbess, and settles into the mundanity of daily life in a small-town convent. From this point, there is not much in the way of a plot to follow in Stone Yard Devotional, but instead more of a processing of guilt, forgiveness, memory, and the nature of goodness.

In interviews, Wood often characterizes what plot there is that follows the narrator’s permanent arrival at the convent as three “visitations:” one, a mouse plague; two, the arrival of the bones of Sister Jenny, who had been murdered while serving in Thailand a few years before; and three, Helen Parry, the “celebrity nun” who accompanied the bones across the border and is now quarantining with the sisters. While these three arrivals at the convent certainly impact all the sisters who live there, “visitations” is a surprising way to describe them because none of them feel all that profoundly spiritual. The mice infestation begins slowly in the background, and gradually becomes more consuming as the novel progresses—they are first mentioned when the narrator “think[s] mice have been into the poultry feed” shortly after she arrives for her permanent stay (42). Similarly, the bones and Helen Parry arrive anticlimactically after weeks of anxious preparation by the sisters; the narrator simply notes, “The bones and Helen Parry are on their way here. Today” (131).

None of these “visitations” have the fiery Pentecostal or terrifying angelic connotations, or Christmas Carol conviction, that Wood’s word carries. Instead, they represent three competing models of moral action: small-scale resilience against the mice, the sacrificial heroism of Jenny, and the global activism of Helen Parry. None offer a clear path to goodness, but together they mirror the narrator’s internal conflict: whether retreating to a quieter life is an abandonment of purpose or a new form of moral clarity.

The narrator is not the only character to struggle with both faith and the nature of the good in the novel. Bonaventure, too, is criticized for pietal laxity (allowing an agnostic divorcée to join her order being just one of the reasons she is chastised by Catholic leadership). Both the narrator and Bonaventure are haunted by the wrongdoings of their past, pointing toward another of the novel’s central themes: forgiveness. Their acts of goodness, then, have much more to do with working toward inner healing than working for the wider good. For the narrator, it is a combination of regretting how a girl in her high school class was treated, mixed in with regret about her final days with her late parents, and, of course, leaving her previous life behind. For Bonaventure, it is the profound regret she feels about her last interaction with Sister Jenny before she moved to Thailand:

Bon couldn’t bear Jenny’s insistence on the immorality of staying: accusations were made, they told each other vicious truths, Jenny left, and Bonaventure grieved. No apologies were ever made nor forgivenesses offered, and with news of Jenny’s disappearance came Bonaventure’s eternal anguish. This is the cause of her penance, her vigil before Jenny’s coffin. (222)

But, Bonaventure is not looking for Jenny’s forgiveness at this point, years after Jenny’s death. She tells the narrator, “I’m not praying for her forgiveness…I’m trying to find a shred of it in myself” (223). She does not believe that Jenny, who died because she was trying to protect women in her halfway house, is a saint, and she still feels angry at her. However, she works tirelessly to bring Jenny’s remains home and give them a proper burial, because she believes this is the right thing to do.

Jenny and Bonaventure’s differing perspectives on what it means to be good is the source of their discord—Bonaventure believed that the sisters were called to stay and live simply in the nunnery, while Jenny believed they could do more good by going out into the world to work against injustice, much as Helen Parry has done with her climate initiatives. The narrator’s situation echoes this conflict—she has left her job in climate justice, which allowed her to work for the global good, to live in a convent, where the most she can do is work for her sisters’ good. As the mouse plague intensifies, she does her share of trapping and disposing of the bodies, but as their number grows, the futility of their efforts calls the “goodness” of these practices into question (and she and the sisters also wrestle with the ethical implications of killing the animals). She does, however, improve the community by bringing in some of her more eco-conscious ideals—she ends the sisters’ practice of stocking their pantries with mostly ultra-processed and individually-packaged foods and moves them to a healthier and more environmentally-sustainable diet. But, is this enough to absolve her from leaving her previous life? Is Bonaventure’s quest to lay Jenny to rest properly enough for her to find that inner forgiveness?

In both Bonaventure’s and the narrator’s stories, forgiveness is not a transaction or an absolution—it’s a quiet, incomplete, and deeply personal attempt to do good in the absence of clear outcomes. The same can be said of the novel’s three “visitations,” which unfold not with revelation or closure, but with the same ambiguity that characterizes the narrator’s and Bonaventure’s inner lives. Sister Jenny’s bones are finally laid to rest hurriedly one morning after Bonaventure decides to stop waiting around for a permit from the government. Helen Parry slips away just after the burial, as the narrator’s last view of her is “the figure of Helen Parry is ferrying bags and boxes from her cabin to the opened hatch of a black car waiting for her in the drive. By the time we reach the last gate, she has gone” (291). It is the drought-ending rain that eventually causes the mouse plague to subside rather than any intervention from the sisters. Despite the fact that this book is written as her intimate devotional, the narrator never reveals the spiritual significance of these “visitations” in her life or on the fate of the world. The world keeps turning and renewing itself, whether the sisters trap all the mice or not, or whether the narrator and Bonaventure work through their pasts to forgive themselves or not.

In his final Easter address, Pope Francis also addressed the topic of both global and local acts of goodness. He spent much of his time imploring global leaders to end violence and pursue peace—in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Armenia and Azerbaijan, in Myanmar. But, at the end of his address, he again turned to the power of goodness in individuals, imploring, “May the principle of humanity never fail to be the hallmark of our daily actions.” As Wood also suggests in Stone Yard Devotional, it is impossible to know whether these small acts done for “the principle of humanity” can truly bring us closer to world peace or a healthier climate. We can’t know when plagues or pandemics will end, whether making amends with those who have already passed on—or with those who haven’t—actually matters. As with Pope Francis’s vision of small daily mercies, Wood’s novel insists that doing good may not yield visible or immediate results—but in a fractured world, it may be the only form of moral clarity we have.

Sarah Selden earned her bachelor's in English and secondary education at Palm Beach Atlantic University and her master's in English and American studies at the University of Oxford. She has taught English in Palm Beach County, in Spain on a Fulbright grant, and currently teaches in Littleton, Colorado.