Cuddy is the affectionate name for Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne (c634-687), a shepherd boy born in the Border country who rose to become prior of Melrose Abbey and who ended his life as a hermit on a tiny, inhospitable island off the coast of Northumbria. Cuthbert is one of Britain’s most popular saints, widely venerated for his affinity with animals, his sympathy for ordinary working people and his association with the landscapes and holy places of the north of England. At the time he died, Christianity was a relatively new religion in Britain. Following his interment on Lindisfarne, Cuthbert’s remains were removed to the mainland in order to prevent their desecration by invading Danes. Loyal monks and shifting bands of followers conveyed Cuthbert’s coffin to Chester-le-Street, where it remained until 995, when Viking invaders again made it necessary to move it to safety. It is on the final leg of this journey that Benjamin Myers’s novel opens, with the great cathedral, founded in Cuthbert’s honour in 1093 at what will later be Durham, still nothing but a holy vision of his most fervent disciples.
Cuddy is divided into four parts, with an additional prologue and interlude. In order to fully disentangle the mostly factual from the possibly fictional, you would need to immerse yourself in the surfeit of sources liberally quoted by Myers in his construction of this literary edifice. You may well be inspired to do so, if only to prolong your acquaintanceship with its landscapes and people; but you might equally embark on this journey as I did, knowing next to nothing about the titular figure, and find yourself swept along on a tide of pure literary sensation.
The first part of the novel, Saint Cuddy, is told in the voice of Ediva, an orphan taken in by the monks as a child, now travelling with them as healer, cook and helper as they search for a final resting place for Cuddy’s coffin. Ediva is alive to the rhythms of the landscape in a way that marks her out as different; she also sees visions of the future cathedral – a building “bigger than anything man has ever built, so big it rears up like a mountain, like a great beast” – where the saint will finally be laid to rest.
Book two, The Mason’s Mark, carries us forward to 1346. Fletcher Bullard – champion archer, domestic abuser – is off fighting the Scots. When his wife, Eda, meets Francis Rolfe, one of a team of masons engaged in repairing and enhancing Durham Cathedral’s decorative stonework, what occurs will live on in the stone.
Book three, The Corpse in the Cathedral, finds us in the company of a 19th-century Oxford professor, Forbes Fawcett-Black, invited to witness the opening of Cuthbert’s tomb. Entertaining though the professor is, with his insufferably cocksure tone and almost cartoonish hatred of the north of England, he initially had me wondering if Myers had committed a misstep. The increasingly serious turn taken by this chapter had the effect of removing my doubts, as well as shaking the professor’s loudly proclaimed contempt for the ineffable. Forbes Fawcett-Black resembles those unfortunate scholars dreamed up by MR James, whose much verbalised confidence in the scientific pursuit of knowledge is no defence against the darker forces they have dismissed as superstition. The Corpse in the Cathedral is a ghost story all the more satisfying for being populated by ghosts we have already met.
The final part of the novel, Daft Lad, brings us at last to the present, or rather the very recent past of 2019. Michael Cuthbert lives with his dying mother in a village three miles outside Durham. He never knew his father, who has done time in prison, and his lack of qualifications leaves him dependent on zero-hours labouring contracts. After an off-the-books job removing old asbestos, Michael is offered a stint of lifting and carrying at Durham Cathedral, where his personal history and unconscious heritage combine to open his eyes to a world that has previously seemed closed to him.
One of the many pleasures of Cuddy lies in spotting the multitude of links between the chapters. There is always an owl-eyed youth, a provider of victuals and seer of visions, a bad monk and a violent man, their prominence ebbing and flowing from story to story. Always and throughout there is the voice of Cuddy, speaking to them in dreams, borne on the wind and in the sound of the sea, passed down the generations through the memories and cherished relics of those who went before.
The language of this novel is as essential to its storytelling as the characters. Ediva’s narrative in book one dances off the page in a free-flowing, discursive stream, forever on the point of coalescing into more formal poetic structures. Book two is delivered in monolithic slabs of language, monumental as the blocks of stone that made the cathedral itself. The playscript of the interlude and the ornate pastiche of the Victorian ghost story lead us to the rich and resonant prosody of the final section, its twin emphasis on sense of place and societal disjuncture keenly familiar from Myers’s previous work in novels including The Gallows Pole and The Perfect Golden Circle.
Michael Cuthbert’s connection with the landscape is of an intensity we might expect from a character in an Alan Garner novel. Michael’s elegiac, impassioned narrative, with its layered connections back to earlier chapters, sets the seal on a novel that has far more to say about who we are as a nation, where we came from and where we are headed than any number of more self-consciously political “state of England” novels. Myers’s experience as a writer shows in his elliptical approach to history and those who make it, and his willingness to take on complex material that retains its mystery even as it compels further discussion. The symbiosis of poetry and story, of knowledge and deep love, marks out Cuddy as a singular and significant achievement.
• Cuddy by Benjamin Myers is published by Bloomsbury. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
