The first sign from Earth that attempts to warn you against the impediment of doom is animals behaving unnaturally. They flee their habitats, exchange their silence for desperate noises, and even commit mass suicide when the end is near and inevitable. When the mice turn up dead at the religious retreat where the anonymous protagonist checks into Charlotte Wood’s Stone Courtyard Devotionalhis initial disgust and unwillingness to clean up the mess are replaced by a mechanical routine of disposing of the bodies before the stench becomes even more unbearable. In this nauseating exercise, the protagonist notices that rats cannibalize their relatives, feed on dead birds, and cause general chaos. The earth churns, raising its most undesirable pests.

the arrival

A middle-aged woman, at the end of her marriage and career, drives to a desolate landscape in Australia and stays at a Christian retreat to rethink her life and the difficult death of her parents. At first, she refrains from socializing: she eats alone, she lies on the floor for lack of something better to do, but little by little she becomes busy with the daily life of the convent. This involves cleaning, cooking, washing. Women – nuns – offer no holy escape. They spend their days doing household chores as they would at home. There are rare references to the Lord and his miracles, and there are no transformations or redemptions.

The women, all very close together, behave more like hot-blooded young people than like serene and enlightened nuns. Jealousy abounds, there are hierarchies, cliques form. Some distrust others. It’s like a nun’s school hostel instead of a real convent.

The narrator knows the circumstances that have brought her here: the absolute pain of losing her parents. The mundanity of life here intersects with his memories of them. He remembers how his mother seemed to have a secret life in which no one was aware of her pain, while his father lived a practical life in which he practiced kindness with an almost conscious and ridiculous effort. He remembers the first groups of Vietnamese refugees who arrived on the shores of his Australian city, the pair of orphans they took in, his parents’ Christian devotion to serving refugees that, despite noble intentions, was still slightly racist. The dirt where he buries the dead mice along with the other animals they have killed brings back memories of his mother tending her garden and feeding the soil with manure and compost. Vietnamese orphans were terrified of the vast, arid Australian expanse because they feared the land hid landmines. On the same land, his mother grew fruits and vegetables that fed the family. Through her mother, the narrator reiterates the Christian belief that “to dust you shall return.” The cycle of life (birth, nourishment, death and decay) is contained within the earth.

But death is not always kind and helpful. A sudden flood in Thailand washes away the bones of Sister Jenny, a convent member who was murdered in Thailand many years ago. Her closest friend here feels possessive of the remains, but Helen Parry, a “celebrity nun” and climate activist, will oversee a proper burial. The narrator remembers Parry as a girl who was bullied at school, but now there is nothing left of who she was before. He is confident in his ways, is something of a bully with the resident nuns, and struts around the convent with complete authority. The arrival of this guest – a visitor – disturbs the established order. Perry brings confirmation that things are changing. Quickly and for the worse. The weather news on the radio and the higher frequency with which dead mice appear signal the beginning of the end.

waiting for departure

Still, the overwhelming presence of death around him does not convert the narrator. She remains an atheist but commits herself to the convent more out of the need to be useful than out of Christian devotion. He resigns himself to dead mice and withered vegetation, insects that fly and birds that fall dead. She heads to the convent in a moment of desperation and now he seems to surround her. She reminds herself that for Catholics, despair is the “supreme sin” and that the only way to stay afloat is to keep your eyes and mind in the present, to continue with the day to day. As the mouse infestation becomes more severe and the land begins to feel stranger, the narrator and the nuns can do nothing but clean with extra rigor each day. An endless and useless pretense of normality.

Therefore, the novel also asks what a “retreat” means in recent times: how can one seek refuge while the world collapses in on itself so catastrophically? Especially when the perpetrators of this violence – we humans – long to return to Earth after thoughtlessly and violently ravaging it for centuries? Maybe we pray for a painless deliverance, maybe we crucify ourselves for our sins, maybe we banish ourselves to purgatory from which there is no escape. There are no easy answers.

The climate catastrophe, the refugee crisis, poverty and hunger are our collective destinies. Like the convent’s inhabitants, we too oscillate between moments of immobilizing dread and efficient productivity. Life happens somewhere between these two extremes. Our routines and chores are filled with memories and prayers: our private contemplation of what the earth is becoming and what we are becoming along with it. Stone Courtyard Devotional The novel unites these seemingly separate cases of desperation and desire, and our willingness – or unwillingness – to accept the impulse toward a biblical end.

Stone Courtyard DevotionalCharlotte Wood, Scepter/Hachette UK.