ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
If you've ever felt the urge to tune out current events, to turn your back on the world and all of its troubles, then you have something in common with the unnamed narrator of the new novel "Stone Yard Devotional." She gives in to that urge, abandons her modern life in Sydney and retreats to a convent. Soon, disruptions arrive. "Stone Yard Devotional" was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and I asked the author, Charlotte Wood, to begin by reading a passage where the narrator contemplates the choice she made.
CHARLOTTE WOOD: (Reading) You do not announce on Facebook that you, an atheist, are leaving your job and your home and your husband to join a cloistered religious community. I mean, you could, and it might be a better way than I chose, which was not to announce anything to anyone. People were wounded, very wounded. They told me so in the letters that came for a time in a steady river to let me know of the hurt and damage I had caused by my disappearance, how much it was still rippling.
SHAPIRO: Do you judge your narrator for renouncing the world and removing herself from it? Do you envy her? How do you feel about that decision?
WOOD: I mean, I was very intent with this book to try not to judge, as a - almost as a kind of technical challenge as a writer, to make a book that didn't really tell the reader how to feel about any of this. And really it's because I still don't know how to feel about this. You know, the narrator is kind of moving up and down, sort of ethically, along a spectrum of - between two sort of mantras that she talks about when she first goes there. And the first one is, action is the antidote to despair. And she has always believed that. You know, it's something I have always believed. But she has hit a wall on that belief.
You know, she comes across these women, and first of all, she thinks they're kind of a bit - kind of pathetic, really, and she thinks, what are they doing here? They're not doing anything out in the world. This is, you know, nice for them, but what are they achieving? And yet, then she sort of - it dawns on her that maybe by doing nothing in the world, they're actually causing less harm than she herself has caused even with all her well-intentioned activism.
SHAPIRO: So you place her in this quiet, contemplative context, and then the disruptions arrive. And there are three big ones. One is a plague of mice. And The Guardian newspaper said there are images in this section that would make Stephen King's hair stand on end.
WOOD: (Laughter).
SHAPIRO: I have to agree. In real life, farms in New South Wales, Australia, had a horrific plague of mice a few years ago. Why did you weave this into the book?
WOOD: Well, look, partly because it was happening while I was writing the book. And it was - you know, it wasn't happening in my house because I live in the inner city, but it was happening out in the countryside. And to be honest, the real reason that I started putting it in the book was I spoke to my friend who lives on a farm, and this was happening to her. And she said, oh, my God, last night, you would not believe what happened. We were all asleep, and then we heard the piano playing in the night.
SHAPIRO: No.
WOOD: And I'd made the same noise that you just made. And...
(LAUGHTER)
WOOD: And to me, that image seemed so chilling...
SHAPIRO: Yeah.
WOOD: ...So strange, so kind of frightening. It wasn't about - you know, it was about this presence. Anyway, I thought, I can't just leave that lying there, you know? That's quite good (laughter).
SHAPIRO: That's a gift to a novelist.
WOOD: It's a gift, so I put it in, and then I was like, OK, I guess I've got a mouse plague now. And it's one of those things that happens when nature is out of balance. The seasons have changed. There's no denying that, in Australia, we are at the very - I mean, I may be wrong, but it feels like we are at the front of what climate change is doing. These rolling kind of catastrophes - the fires, the COVID, this mouse plague, floods - these things just sort of felt biblical, to be honest.
SHAPIRO: Yeah, I was going to say, the mouse plague is so useful. I don't want to say it's great, but it is, at the same time, hyperrealistic, and it is biblical, and it is about climate change, and it is incomprehensible, even as it is something that people you knew were actively living through in the moment. Like, it does all of these seemingly contradictory things simultaneously.
WOOD: Yeah, it's one of those things, you know, as an artist, as a novelist, you sort of land on something, and your conscious mind doesn't really understand why you just know that that's got to go in. But later, I understood that, as you just said, it's all articulated beautifully, the kind of - the narrative purpose of it, but also that it was just real.
SHAPIRO: I want to ask you about another character in the book named Helen Parry because she is kind of the opposite of your narrator in many ways. She is a celebrity nun, a committed activist. She arrives at the convent, and she is on Zoom meetings and phone calls about human trafficking and deforestation. And she seems like a character who could have been both very fun to write and also who could easily take over a narrative, so how did you wrangle her?
WOOD: Yeah, I was interested - you know, when I was first thinking about nuns and realizing, of course, very quickly, that - oh, surprise, surprise - there's a great variety and, you know, there are all different kinds of women who live different kinds of lives, even as a nun. I was really interested in - there are these women around the world, they're kind of - you know, I think of them as rogue operators who are fully political, very, very active, very vocal. They're troublemakers. They speak truth to power and dictators.
So I was sort of interested that that is such the opposite life of this cloistered, silent retreat life. And bringing those two things together really interested me because when Helen Parry arrives, she brings with her all the kind of energy and angst about the world that these other women have deliberately left behind. So she's a very disturbing presence in this place.
SHAPIRO: I know that you don't want to judge your characters and that you deliberately aim not to judge your characters, but when you have set up these polarities of engagement versus withdrawal, or action versus do no harm, where do you place yourself on that continuum?
WOOD: Well, I place myself running up and down that path, to be...
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
WOOD: And it's something that has really preoccupied me as a writer, that - the question of how much should I be in the world? How much should I be out of the world? And my kind of instinct is to stay out of the world as much as I can. I can't bear it. I'm going to just - because my life is fine. You know, I can turn away from it. I'm a middle-class white woman. I can live a very nice life ignoring politics. And yet, I don't think that's a moral way to proceed. So, you know, how much to stay in? How much to retreat? At what point is it ethical to do either? You know, those questions are really present for me, have always been present for me, but they seem more and more urgent.
SHAPIRO: Charlotte Wood's latest novel is called "Stone Yard Devotional." Thank you so much for talking with us about it.
WOOD: Oh, I've loved it. Thank you, Ari.
(SOUNDBITE OF KACEY MUSGRAVES SONG, "OH, WHAT A WORLD") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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