From the beginning, Ben Myers has fixed an icy gaze on the destructive urges of men (and his characters are mostly men) who, determined to make their mark on the world, more often end up inflicting lasting wounds. But then came a certain thawing, culminating in last year’s The Perfect Golden Circle, which raised the possibility, through a more humble and creative recalibration, of healing. Inspired by the seventh-century hermit Saint Cuthbert, ‘the unofficial patron saint of the north of England’, but set against the fractious and often violent upheavals of the region, his latest novel, Cuddy, promises to draw these two strands together.
What we learn directly of Cuthbert is limited to a few pages of cryptic, prefatory sketch. The main narrative is split, like a symphony, into four main movements: first, devotees of his cult transport his corpse and relics, under threat of viking raids, to the safety of their final resting place at the incipient Durham Cathedral; in the late middle ages, a mason working on the cathedral walls falls for a healer in thrall to an abusive archer; in the nineteenth century, a staid Oxford don travels north to participate, reluctantly, in a fated excavation of the saint’s crypt, and; finally, in our time, precarious employment on a restoration project brings a local labourer into collision with all this foundational history. And that’s the bones of it, plotwise. But the book is a journey through genre as much as through time, offering up epic poetry, border ballad, antiquarian ghost story, and social realism. And then then there are the bold and often discordant stylistic flourishes – the extensive quotation from the historical sources, the experimental typography, and a regrettable foray into play-script. This is a work as polysemous and protean as the saint himself, wherein what begins as a deathly, earthy odyssey transforms into time-collapsing, perspective-splintering fugue; think As I Lay Dying shot through with Alan Garner’s Red Shift.
“The book is a journey through genre as much as through time, offering up epic poetry, border ballad, antiquarian ghost story, and social realism.”
It can sometimes feel as though Myers has written four unrelated novellas, with the Cuthbert elements tacked on. But then again we are taught to notice clues connecting each – the prophetic visions, the restorative power of cooking, the owl eyes and, yes, the presence of violent men. And notice them we do, given it is these motifs which most excite Myers’ exuberance for the lyric, often to excess: at one point, a character’s eyes are described as ‘grottoes in which water drips from the ceiling’. Ultimately, the inclusion of these details in all four parts may serve to detract from the immersiveness of each. Far more unifying than this is the sense of place Myers achieves in his evocation of the Northumbrian landscape. Scarred as it is – by settlement, extraction, war, enclosure, or industrialism – its essence will ultimately outlive its transformations, he suggests, in great monuments of culture – crafted in language or hewn from stone – created in a spirit of love and generosity (qualities of which Cuthbert was merely the earliest known embodiment).
And Cuddy will stand as such an edifice: imposing if also forbidding, and of a construction so vast and variegated that even the sceptic will find sanctuary in its vaults; a cathedral of a book.
Words: Diarmuid McGreal
Cuddy
