Book Review and Critique By Harsimran Kaur | Rating: 4/5

There is a thought expressed by the narrator that caught my attention,

“But why should a cemetery be neat?”

I feel even if its neat or not, how does it really matter. I also feel that death is not as devastating as it is supposed to be. It is a clean chit to the sins, the self-deceiving and the self-induced pain. So, why not be laid at a place where repulsions no longer exist….it is serene and the dirt of ego has been dissolved.

The narrator works in a religious abbey in Australia, doing administrative jobs. She is obstruse, well-defined, and perhaps a mix of two so therefore she is complex, not that simple because complexity is also about uncertainty. The world, the people are precariously knitting their own arguments and so does she.  She defies what seems normal, and says with a pinch of arrogance,

“I wonder if they think boredom, is a sin. Do all religions include some form of repetitive movement?”

Religiosity is not her playground so then she must be a player of perceptive consciousness. Sometimes, when you read her, it strikes if she really wants to live, and is searching for death because it seems she is losing faith.

And, then I think about myself, all of us, of what life is? Isn’t the reason to live primarily distorted? There is a revolutionary concurrence to such shifts, and if the purpose that one is wealthily attached to loses significance then such patronizing conformity to living changes its course. Like it does for the narrator who leaves her job of a conservational specialist and walks out of her marriage. Maybe because with time, things lose their vitality. Believability thus becomes secondary. Faith is contrapuntal so the idea of living rest on subconscious dilemmas and through such relativity, one finds approval to one’s own constant imperviousness.

How mercurial one can be?

Transition is difficult. To leave a life for the service to God is mystical but irrelevant to many.

The narrator feels the discomfort too. I talk about discomfort because every movement, every trajectory, every uncertainty, every monotony is a prophesy to now chase the finality but we often forget that what we are chasing is continuity, and such is the case that the narrator eventually realizes that her reason to join the abbey is not to dissolve the past because it can never be but then to align with the new purpose.

The discomfort thus felt is obligatory, and through that pause, the simple truths become familiar, and the arises comfort—not of the body but of essence.

I sense such a discomfort in the book, ‘Stone Yard Devotional’; a discomfort of grief, the tyranny of aberrations, the strait-laced normality & then to signify a religious act, then to condemn it, all this, with the passage of time, sets in a comfort of ‘belief’, when it is actually a transformative impasse, a liminal discomfort.

So, therefore, I conclude that discomfort carries the weight of prolapsed comfort. The narrator moves cities and she finds it a copious lethargy. But then comes acceptance to allow under a different sky, under different sovereignty, to breathe in the temperamental air and let the coarseness swim in the throat. This is acceptance not failure but to make it seem like a comfort is a paradoxical shift from the ‘move on’ archetype.

One change, and then the discomfort becomes a life-force when the town is plagued with mice and the whole abbey becomes a slaughter house, and then there is a purpose where the distorted mind does not indulge in self-conceit.  

The nuns in the abbey all get together to wage a war against the plague. Mouse traps are set, the stench becomes unbearable, but something continues. And here, I must put forward that in the presence of one’s reality, concealed and if to let it out were an effrontery because human poignancy is considered to be a virtue, we see that the nuns, in their temperate exhaustion and mournful sorrow; and how remarkably they hide it and once must not call it ignorance, come together when the catastrophe strikes of the littered scepticism of the mice. There is wisdom that prevails to be rescued, to ensue a war that somehow is an anathema.

So, there is this intense mouse plague. How ironical it is when we find reasons to live and death gives no reason through its mysterious siege. The mouse plague has skirted the entire abbey, the surroundings, and there is death all around—of the mice being trapped by the wooden clips, bodies disposed of in pot holes and the putrid stench of death is a reckoning of fear, an agonized imprint of overpowering darkness to never see the light. The nuns feel it and then there is mysticism in laying rest to the dead mice as if it were a soul purpose, and a truth thus awakens at the very moment that we shall all perish one day.

So, is unison of mind a kind of salvation?

But here there is an irony. The trouble with the mice is so absorbing that the nuns are going berserk. How a tiny creature can be so dreadful shows the inadequacy of humans to become tolerant for once. ‘Tolerance’ is committed to intention and I see the nuns altering it.

Coming back to the narrator, she has memories in abundance. She often reflects and these memoires are just not vague, wearisome, off the hook indulgences but of alienation, isolation and bereavement.

What she remembers is perhaps women, young and old in hibernated distress—alive yet soaring in the painful monotony of morality as if to steer the idea of freedom would be a blasphemy, and here I must confirm that ‘freedom’ becomes a revolutionized ideology, not mere a human necessity.

Why she remembers?

• Is there a frisson or an experience of utter vulnerability to remember all?
• Or is she redefining saintliness in the prism of devotion & defiance?

The narrator remembers Helen Parry from her youth who has now come to the abbey to bring along the remains of the dead sister Jenny. She hears stories of other nuns who were murdered for reigning their virtues and therefore are martyrs. And then she is confused of how one-woman judges another as if the idea to be a certain kind of a woman varies, as if two women can never be alike & thus one must fear the other. In fact, in a society where the ‘other’ is an incendiary issue of constant scrutiny, one woman puddling a row of contingence, dishonouring the forbearance in case the reality holds her forbidden, and in such class distinction what is just left is superfluity.

‘Stone Yard Devotional’ by Charlotte Wood carries inhibition; a set of virtues and a discipline around human estrangement. It is inspiring at times, and during certain moments, one feels that life’s journey is heuristic; in the greatness of life, pride drains you off energy.

She remembers her mother often. And the mother you are, and the mother I am, and in certainty, there was a time when I was a child to my mother, and at present it’s the same exaggerated fluidity.

My mother winces at my piqued curiosity till date and fleets like an agreeable deer the moment I need her. To walk through it in the book with the narrator, she remembers her mother, in discomfort, in preparation, in surrender, and when such time fades, the sentimentality still remains. When the leaves fall, the trees shudder, the wind curses along and the air traps the nostalgia, and when one senses the ghost in the grotesque darkness & then comes in the disoriented flux of obsessions, and then to ward off such monstrosities & when nothing works, there is always a mother.

Is such a relationship away from perception?

What else does the narrator remember?

A friend who is dying. She looks back at the coercion, the hatred & the chastisement Hellen Parry went through in school and she also remembers her own personal depravity. So, when such thoughts callously strike, a perfunctory anguish settles in, a kind of a silent war with the self, releasing the dominions of control and then she sees people slipping one by one. The anger gradually subsides, and one begins to rummage the life’s truth.

Have we all found that truth?

So as the narrator remembers such stories; of a boy killing his parents or the brother begging his sister to let him die; is it a gradual intervention by the divine, or an imperceptible divide to reason the existence of God?

Nothing suits the narrator’s perceived realism and therefore she chooses God.

The condescending catastrophes of the past, and their remembrance and then to work in the religious abbey closer to God, can we say it provides her a subtle precocity to not be endangered anymore, and if spirituality is ‘home’?   

So, we see displeasures turning into a purpose, and one requires some anonymity to find contentment. I am aware of the displeasures that have surrounded me, and no matter how obstructing thy have been, there is no pleasure without them. Such is their deep-rooted precision, that further evolvement becomes necessary.

A sense of unfamiliarity speaks as is the case with discomfort. So, when the narrator finds relief in anonymity, it’s not about the physical but there is a relief to touch down the memories, moments in a way that is less reckoning and there is newness to such extrapolations.

Behind she leaves the grave of her parents, and then the escapism, the erythematic running; the past volumizing the decrepit, the insolence of humanity; a profound discomfort follows and then there is no longer a flooded propaganda of the past but a valued urgency to create something new.

What about sainthood; the narrator gradually awakens to it. There is an alarming curiosity and I must fix it of what exactly is saintliness?

• Is it a product of silent stoicism, rebuffing the inner pursuance to be alive, and then there are in fact saints acting through redemptive sufferings?
• And, if the idea is to renounce the worldly frisson of ill-conceived notions, then does ascetism become a moral affliction?

So, it’s for the readers to decide if the value of life can be weighed through the arrogance born of mortification.

The narrator does not consider herself a saint but ‘sainthood’ seems ambiguous to her—prayers are abstract, and if I were to explain,

• Is praying heroic?
• Is it a combination of the conscious and the unconscious?
• Is it an intention or an action?
• Is it continuity or a halt to certainty?
• Is it ever answered or is a way to find answers within?
• Is it faith or orthodoxy?

And, how do we know the prayers have been answered?

We Ascend….

So, now with the plague nearing its end, the bones of sister Jenny buried, what is then left for the narrator? She has finally made an identity trying to get close to the past, yet remaining relevant in the present.

There is grief as if the world is dystopian; the mouse skirting around, the vigil surrounding the self-probing morality and beliefs which the narrator finds amusing if serving God tantamount to loving God. There is an echo of vulnerability, a sense of doubt of why suffering is so fragile and if it’s the only viable reason for liberation?

And there is restlessness, a contemplative meditation to understand the human vitality to surrender to the unpleasantness but then to rise finally to find peace in the virtue of belonging.