Salvation

A woman leaves her life in Sydney behind for a short break at a convent's guest house on the Monaro Plains in NSW. She is at loose ends, uncertain about her job and at the end of her marriage. While she is not religious, she observes the rituals performed by the nuns, attending their prayers and services. She is trying to find inner peace in a noisy world. When she leaves, she does not expect to return.

A few months later she is back to stay at the convent. She does not take vows or adopt the faith, but rather she performs silent service - cooking, cleaning and working in the yard. She lives a humble life among the sisters and becomes connected with nature in a way she could not have imagined when working at the Threatened Species Rescue Centre. For the most part, nothing much happens - just a slow, day-to-day pace of a life disconnected from the wider world.

While they are largely protected from the COVID-19 pandemic in their remote location, the mouse plague that ran through New South Wales in 2021 is upon them. Our protagonist gets to work trying to protect what little the nuns have from being ravaged by mice. She chases, traps, and buries the mice and lies awake at night listening to them scurry in the walls. 

Into the mix comes Helen Parry, an activist nun who has been forced to return to this convent for a short stay disrupting the rhythm and bringing forth memories of the protagonist's childhood when she was a school with Parry. Parry has brought with her the bones of a sister who died overseas, and the nuns keep vigil while they await permission to bury a member of their order.

Wood has crafted a compelling novel where the pace is slowed and the narrator is tested by these three incursions - the mice, the remains and Parry - into her solitude. Through her descriptive prose, Wood makes the most of even the smallest moments in the daily lives of these women. It is a story where seemingly nothing much happens and the reader is left wondering what the narrator is thinking. It is written in the style of a journal, jotting down what happens, a story told for no one but herself.

What I loved about the novel is that the narrator is respectful of the religious beliefs of the nuns, but is not compelled to join them. She exists outside their belief structure, but is welcomed regardless. I also love that Wood writes realistic women characters in their 50s, a demographic that deserves great novelists like Wood. 

My reviews of other great novels by Charlotte Wood are available on this blog:

• The Natural Way of Things (2015)
• The Weekend (2019)