Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood review – a quiet novel of immense power

What are we going to do about global heating, about mass extinction, about our rivers? What ability do we have to change things, now that power lies mostly in the hands of unaccountable corporations and shameless demagogues? Is there even any point in trying? The narrator of Stone Yard Devotional, who has been working in species conservation, chooses that most seductive solution – despair. She leaves her life and marriage in Sydney and checks into the retreat house of an enclosed convent on the Monaro Plains in New South Wales. And retreat she certainly does. For a while she just lies on the floor. Later, she joins in with the life of the convent – preparing food, cleaning, turning up to mass and the hours of office. There’s no great conversion moment, no sense of redemption, just some women getting on with things. This probably does not sound like the most spine-tingling premise for a book, but I have rarely been so absorbed, so persuaded by a novel. Also, I haven’t yet mentioned the mice.

There is a tradition of novelists using the pressure-cooker environment of a convent for thought experiments or satire. Rumer Godden took on the contradictions of colonialism in Black Narcissus. Muriel Spark did Watergate in habits for The Abbess of Crewe. But the nuns at Stone Yard are too busy keeping everything spruce and orderly to go in for wire taps or erotic shenanigans. The pressure here comes from outside, in the shape of three arrivals. First come the mortal remains of Sister Jenny, a member of the order who was murdered in Thailand years before. A sudden flood has flushed her bones from their hiding place and now they are to be buried in the mother house. The nuns keep vigil while struggling with feelings of loss and anger.

The bones are accompanied by their most famous sister, a climate activist called Helen Parry, whose presence pulls into the convent all the noise of the world the narrator has tried to leave behind. The narrator had known Parry as a child when they were at school together. She’d seen her being terribly bullied and been nagged by guilt for her part in it. But the adult Parry is invulnerable, sure of herself, effective. A broken-hearted child has become a whole-hearted campaigner. Friendless when young, she has no need of any form of affirmation now. It’s worth reading the book for the portrait of Parry alone.

Story continues

The change in the climate imposes itself on the nuns not only through the news on Parry’s radio, but also through mice – a plague of them, swarming through the convent in horrifying numbers after a drought in the north. A window blind that seems to be swaying in the breeze turns out to be covered in them. Their noise is inescapable. It takes a mechanical digger to make a pit big enough for the bodies. There are images in this section that would make Stephen King’s hair stand on end. But where in a horror story there would be some kind of social breakdown or an act of heroism, the nuns just keep doing the best they can to stem the tide and keep things clean.

The irony of the narrator turning to a convent in despair is that for Catholics despair is the unforgivable sin. In interviews Wood has referred to these three incidents – the bones, the mice, the return of Parry – as “visitations”, as if they were tests, like the temptations in the desert. These tests throw up all kinds of possibilities: about how we might live with the damage we’ve done, about how there might be solace and even meaning in service and observance, about how though we are broken, we might still be of use.

“Attention,” said Simone Weil, “is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Wood is a writer of the most intense attention. Everything here – the way mice move, the way two women pass each other a confiding look, the way a hero can love the world but also be brusque and inconsiderate to those around them – it all rings true. It’s the story of a small group of people in a tiny town, but its resonance is global. This is a powerful, generous book.

• Stone Yard Devotional is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.