The mice plague and moral struggles in 'Stone Yard Devotional'

Charlotte Wood’s novel explores a biblical-scale mouse infestation, existential despair, and the search for atonement.

Illustration by Dorling Kindersley

By Sarah Oktaviany and Novanka Laras

Stone Yard Devotional, by Charlotte Wood

Mice are everywhere—rooting through chicken feed, scurrying across roads in waves, and invading homes, cars, and even church organs. The infestation wreaks havoc on food supplies and infrastructure, leaving behind chewed electrical cords, torn bags of flour, and poisoned carcasses. This biblical-scale plague is no work of fiction; it plagued eastern Australia in 2021, driven by unseasonably heavy rains and warm temperatures. It serves as a backdrop in Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, a meditative novel that examines existential despair, the limits of activism, and the possibility of atonement.

At the center of the novel is an unnamed narrator, a former wildlife conservationist in her 60s who has abandoned her career and husband in Sydney to seek refuge in a rural convent. Yet solitude does not provide an escape. Three arrivals disrupt her search for peace: a coffin containing the remains of Sister Jenny, a nun who disappeared decades earlier while running a women’s shelter in Bangkok; Helen Parry, a childhood classmate turned activist nun; and, of course, the relentless tide of mice. Each brings its own reckoning, forcing the narrator to confront the failures of her past and the irreconcilable contradictions of her present.

A meditation on atonement and regret

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Stone Yard Devotional unfolds through the narrator’s diary-like reflections, revealing a woman grappling with her past as much as with the world’s mounting crises. She recalls her career spent trying—and failing—to protect threatened species, only to realize that every action, even those meant to help, contributes to environmental destruction.

“At every step of my every attempt I have only worsened the destruction,” she laments, noting how every press release, protest, and conservation effort ultimately required consuming more resources. She envies the nuns’ stillness, their ability to exist without harming the world. But even their way of life is not without moral compromise. The convent’s methods for exterminating the mice—drowning them in buckets—are unsettling, as is the casual racism of one of the older nuns. The illusion of harmlessness crumbles under scrutiny.

The novel shifts between past and present, blending memories with the narrator’s quiet daily routines: setting mouse traps, attending meals, and negotiating government approval to bury Sister Jenny. She reflects on childhood cruelty, recalling how she and her classmates bullied Helen, a girl already suffering abuse at home. Now, decades later, Helen has become a formidable activist nun, commanding attention and unsettling the other sisters with her outspokenness. The narrator attempts to apologize, only to receive an indifferent response:

“I can see why that might have been a big … incident … for you,” Helen replies after a pause. “But for me, that day was nothing.”

The exchange encapsulates Stone Yard Devotional’s themes of penance and absolution. Some wounds, it suggests, are more lasting for the transgressor than for the victim.

Wrestling with faith and morality

Despite living among nuns, the narrator does not adopt their faith. Instead, she observes their rituals with detached curiosity, struggling to understand their unwavering devotion. Their daily prayers initially seem like interruptions to real work—until she realizes, “It’s not an interruption to the work; it is the work.” Faith, in this community, is an act of endurance.

But the novel does not romanticize this existence. The narrator wrestles with the historical sins of the Catholic Church, haunted by images of mass graves and forced conversions. Even as she finds solace in the quiet rhythms of convent life, she remains aware of its contradictions.

Charlotte Wood offers no easy resolutions. Activism, renunciation, and faith are all flawed paths, but each is a human attempt at meaning. In the end, Stone Yard Devotional is not about redemption—it is about learning to live with the unanswered questions.

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