Guest review by Jane Rogers: STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL by Charlotte Wood

"I first read Stone Yard Devotional in great greedy gulps. It is intense and nakedly personal, and left me wanting more on every page."

Jane Rogers has written ten novels, including The Testament of Jessie Lamb, Man-Booker longlisted and winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award 2012. Other works include Mr Wroe's Virgins (which she dramatised as a BBC drama series), and Promised Lands (Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award). Jane also writes short stories, radio drama and adaptations, most recently of Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day which was a Radio 4 afternoon play. She has taught writing to a wide range of students.

Her new short story collection Fire-Ready, in which several of the stories are about the climate emergency now or in the future, is now available in paperback. For more information, see Jane's website.

I first read Stone Yard Devotional in great greedy gulps. It is intense and nakedly personal, and left me wanting more on every page. Afterwards I re-read it more slowly, with my writer’s head on, trying to work out how Charlotte Wood has made this, her seventh novel, so compelling.

At first glance it’s not riveting subject matter. A burnt-out environmental activist goes on retreat to a small religious community in rural New South Wales, near the town where she grew up. She then decides to stay there permanently.

If you were to pitch this idea to a publisher, I wouldn’t fancy your chances.

But the novel is, as they say, unputdownable, and has won accolades around the world including shortlisting for last year's Booker prize.

The unnamed narrator is initially bemused by the nuns’ prayers and psalms: ‘The words seem to make no sense. There’s a lot about evil-doers trying to destroy the psalm’s narrator. All day long they crush me. All this warbled by a bunch of nuns way out here on the high, dry Monaro plains, far from anywhere.’ Her critical observations of life in the nunnery are intercut with memories of her beloved parents and her grief at their early deaths.

Three events disrupt monastic life. The first is a plague of mice, caused by a drought in the north. First they nest in the piano; soon they have eaten all the electrical wiring and infested every room, to the point that nuns are emptying traps every hour and an excavator has to be brought in to dig a pit deep enough for the stinking corpses and the layers of lime which must cover them. ‘Opening the car door now takes mettle. Yesterday I lowered myself too heavily into the seat and felt a squirming sensation at my back that made me roar and hurl myself from the vehicle … A dozen mice exploded into the air from behind the cushion.’

The second is the discovery of the bones of Sister Jenny, who had gone missing after leaving the convent to work in a women’s refuge in Thailand. Covid shutdowns complicate the return of her remains, and her coffin is accompanied back by the third disruptor, Helen Parry. Now an internationally famous climate activist, and the convent’s most celebrated former member, Helen Parry is returning to her home town to visit her dying mother.

The tension between activism and retreat from the world is a vital thread running through the novel. Early on the narrator quotes to herself, firstly from Joan Baez: Action is the antidote to despair. And then in opposition, from Hippocrates, First, do no harm. She chronicles the harm done by even the most well-intentioned of activists (‘Every minuscule action after waking means slurping up resources, expelling waste, destroying habitat, etc’ ), and develops real respect for the nuns’ spiritual work; their slow careful observation, the depth of their attention. I was reminded of Death of a Salesman’s Willy Loman: ‘Attention must be paid.’

Other threads include mothers and daughters (the narrator was close to her earth-loving, honest, kindly mother; Helen Parry was beaten in public by hers, who spent long intervals in the local asylum, while Helen was left to bring herself up.)

In an interview for Literary Hub Wood says, ‘I realised early on that I have this place of silence and stasis, which is not good for a novel. I thought, I’m kind of writing a still life painting.’ Her solution is to use an episodic diary form, shifting seemingly randomly from one time period or place or event to another. In the course of a few pages she goes from the nuns’ diet, to their chickens eating live mice, to a childhood memory, to the arrival of Sister Jenny’s bones, to a dream, to pangs of guilt at having bullied Helen Parry as a child. The reader is expected to join the dots – the reader is an active player. And I believe this is the key to the novel’s strength. Wood cites W B Yeats as a powerful influence on her book, and the LitHub interview features a quote from him, which guided her in her work.

‘Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.’

Wood has followed his advice with consummate skill, and – to this reader at least – her novel is irresistible.

Stone Yard Devotional is published by Sceptre.

See also: a Q &A feature with Jane about Fire-Ready, her short story collection. 

Guest review by Katherine Roberts - CAVE IN THE SNOW by Vicki Mackenzie

Katherine Roberts’ latest novel, Bone Music, invokes the spirit of the 13th century Mongolian steppes to tell the story of Genghis Khan’s rise to power… no Yetis, but it does have wolves! Published by Greystones Press.

In 1976, many years before Buddhism became trendy in the West, a fishmonger’s daughter from the East End of London retreated to a cave 13,200 feet up in the Himalayas, where she spent the next 12 years of her life meditating with only the wild creatures for company. Her name was Diane Perry, though today she is better known by her Buddhist name of Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo. Cave in the Snow  is the fascinating story of Diane’s life up until 1998, when the book was published, by which time she had emerged from her cave with her new name to embark upon a fierce schedule of talks across the world to fund her new project: building a nunnery for young Buddhist girls. Happily, the funds were raised, and the Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery now exists in the Kangra Valley of northern India, close to the seat-in-exile of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Diane Perry’s lifelong quest for spiritual enlightenment resonates with me as an author. We spend months, sometimes years, in our metaphorical caves working on our writing projects with only our characters for company, and then emerge blinking into the world to talk about our published books. The book ‘called’ to me from a local charity shop bargain box, not because of its cover (which on my edition is strangely prosaic with its photograph of Tenzin Palmo, dressed in her Buddhist robes, standing beside what I think must be the Tibetan flag), but because of its evocative title coupled with the interesting blurb on the back. How could a woman raised in the East End of London in the aftermath of the Blitz survive alone in a cave in the Himalayas for so many years? Why did she feel the need to retreat there? And what did she discover during her long and lonely years of meditation?

In Tenzin Palmo’s own words, referring to a period when she worked at the Department of Employment to raise funds for her return to India prior to entering her cave: “I felt very sad - there were all these middle-aged guys saying ‘What have I done with my life?’ and young married people with mortgages, already trapped.” Authors also tend to view society like this, from the outside as detached observer rather than as part of the group, and it can be dangerous to look too long or too deeply at what actually matters in life. Shortly afterwards, Tenzin Palmo entered her cave, but not before carrying out a few essential renovations with the help of the locals to give it some proper walls and a door she could close against the elements and wolves. As she says in the book: “It was a very pukka cave.”

Tenzin Palmo did not write in her cave. She read her Buddhist texts and meditated in her box-bed, which was not big enough to allow her to lie down. She grew vegetables outside in the summer months, and - like St Francis of Assisi - was visited by the animals and birds of the mountains. She conversed with wolves, saw the prints of the elusive snow leopard outside her cave in the snow in the depths of winter, and also a huge footprint that may have belonged to the legendary Yeti. It seems she also survived possible breast cancer, and a serious eye infection. And, through all these hardships, she thrived.

It must have been a profound experience, and I kept wishing that Tenzin Palmo had written this book herself, rather than having to read her story secondhand. But Vicki Mackenzie has written a clear and faithful account based on her interviews with Tenzin Palmo, and part of the allure of a spiritual quest is the difficulty of capturing such a mystery in words. Perhaps the best any writer can hope to do is sketch down the bones, and leave it up to the individual reader to supply the flesh and the colour. If you are curious to know more, Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo is still teaching - see her website for details.

Cave in the Snow is published by Bloomsbury.