Born in the seventh century, Cuthbert of Lindisfarne is the unofficial patron saint of the north, where he’s still known as Cuddy. He began life as a lowly boy shepherd and ended it as a famed religious hermit, holed up on a rocky island off the Northumbrian coast. When Viking raiders arrived, Cuthbert’s body was taken to the mainland by a band of loyal monks, generations of whom traipsed around with it while battles raged until a sign from God (or simple fatigue) told them to stop on a hilltop. There, the settlement that would become Durham sprang up, eventually followed by the towering Norman cathedral that houses his shrine.
In the hands of local novelist Benjamin Myers, the afterlife of St Cuthbert’s legend – and indeed of his mortal remains, which for centuries were said to have remained intact – forms the backbone of a hulking, multi-volume novel. It makes room for poetry and reams of quotations from diverse sources, as well as prose that adopts the viewpoints of stonemasons and brewers, cooks and academics, making for a vibrant alternative history of the region.
At the start is Ediva, a vision-prone orphan who is travelling with Cuddy’s coffin and his disciples in the year 995. Several hundred years later, another section imagines the stories that might have shaped the very fabric of the cathedral. A lengthy pastiche of MR James proves less convincing, lacking the antiquarian’s chilling brevity as it relates the descent into madness of a Victorian don summoned to witness the disinterment of the saint’s remains.
Cuddy closes in the class-ridden, austerity-riven 21st century with Michael, a 19-year-old labourer, who joins a team repairing a cathedral balustrade while caring for his terminally ill mother. As Michael comes to realise, he too is part of a never-ending history, “one more link in a chain of people … a continuum”. Throughout, that interconnectedness is underscored by homely motifs in the form of apples and stews, and by the unsettling gaze of a pair of owl-like eyes.
Cuddy, Myers’s eighth novel, is a polyphonic hymn to a very specific landscape and its people. At the same time, it deepens his standing as an arresting chronicler of a broader, more mysterious seam of ancient folklore that unites the history of these isles as it’s rarely taught.
Cuddy by Benjamin Myers is published by Bloomsbury (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
