- She's an unnamed woman, an atheist, separated from her husband, and fleeing to ‘the high, dry Monaro plains, far from anywhere’. Her destination is a small convent. Her parents died. She's alone.
- Welcome to the world of Charlotte Wood: a group of women dealing with their plight in a challenging, often male dominated, world. The convent, which welcomes her as a visitor, has half a dozen Catholic nuns who adhere to a daily ritual of Vespers, Lauds, and the Middle Hour. The wife of her old school friend Richard who is the convent's gardener and handyman …thinks there’s something…sick about it. Something unnatural about the way you all live here.
- Wood's two previous novels The Natural Way of Things (2015) and The Weekend (2019) also focused on small groups of women, their group dynamics and individual personalities, quirks and obsessions.
- What is intriguing about this new novel is the wider scope of Wood's exploration. Her narrator recalls all sorts of incidents and people that were in some way important to her as a child, a young woman, and an adult. Slowly and surely a common thread emerges. The people that matter to her are not the tepid nuns and their meaningless lives, but the strong individuals she's encountered who go against the grain confidently and fearlessly. Yet she's spent four years as a permanent resident in the convent. She just…didn’t go home. She thinks of the mass graves in which nuns…had buried babies they called illegitimate…the savagery of the Catholic Church…Yet here I am. Wrestle. Wrestle...Choosing disappearance...I had a need, an animal need, to find a place I had never been but which was still, in some undeniable way, my home.
- Sister Jenny and Sister Andrea left the convent a few years previously to go to Thailand where they set up a shelter for abandoned women. Jenny was attacked by an abusive American priest and never seen again, but her bones have now been found. They will arrive at the convent in eight days, brought by Sister Helen Parry. Helen was a classmate St Ursula's High School and rebellious. She was bullied but is now a charismatic, formidable woman, a fighter and a global 'celebrity nun', leading a life of protest for justice around the world.
- Her mother was an inspiration. She was kind and an independent thinker, as was her father. They welcomed the Vietnamese immigrants. We're confronted with the extremes of being alive, of quiet servitude at one end, and of fulfilling, challenging immersion at the other. Wood plunges us into the intricacies, and the ideas and reflections they prompt. It's an intriguing exploration.
- There are many memories of people our narrator's known in her life. Cleo for example, the beautiful young vegetarian. Everyone in the town hated her. She didn’t mind. All the rebels are attractive, free spirited, charismatic leaders. Following the social rules are foreign to them. There’s a toughness about them. A loathing of shallow genuflecting. It’s been my observation over many years that those who most powerfully resist convention quite peaceably accept the state of being reviled.
- The novel prompts so many reflections it's a joy to read. Perhaps the best Wood has written so far.
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