Cuddy: Winner of the 2023 Goldsmiths Prize

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I have not read any books by Baenjamin Myers before but so I approached this novel cautiously particularly as its main plot was about St Cuthbert and how he reached his final resting place in Durham Cathedral.

The final book is the story of Michael, a teenager labourer who in 2017 begins work at the cathedral among the repairs to the medieval masonry. I found his earlier novels rather bleak, but he then wrote The Offing, a wonderfully sensitive coming-of-age novel set on the Yorkshire coast. As the book moves from 687 to 2019 in centuries-long leaps, there are less obvious themes which run throughout. The stories we tell one another are all that shall remain when time dies and even the strongest sculpted stones crumble to sand. The stench of it is the perfume of bus stations everywhere; the desperate reek of transience at the crossroads of intoxicated.He never knew his father, who has done time in prison, and his lack of qualifications leaves him dependent on zero-hours labouring contracts. Having walked along the garlic-infused hillside between the cathedral and the River Wear on a gloomy early spring day, though, I could at least appreciate the gothic sensibility of the 19th century section. Cuthbert’s coffin to Durham, the narrator is a girl who has visions and is able to talk to the saint directly, in which we get glimpses of his life. I read Book I with enthusiasm, its verse-like format and fragments of historical detail building a picture of his 10th-century followers ("this colourful caravan of committed Cuddy acolytes / this coffin-carrying cult, forever on the flit, / forever making camp and breaking camp") as they travelled with his remains and envisioned a home for them at Durham.

This book is a challenge no doubt, and demands perseverance from its readers, not all of whom will want to take on the trouble of that task.

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. The common thread is a history of St Cuthbert and Durham cathedral but within that we have experiments with form and structure. Telling the story of Saint Cuthbert and Durham Cathedral over the period of a thousand years, the author takes full advantage of all styles of writing be it poetry, prose , play script and the use of historical quotations.

I found it a little hard to get going with reading this as the mix of styles and forms used to move through the vast period of history covered in this retelling of the story and legacy of Saint Cuthbert from Lindisfarne to Dunhelm and Durham of today, was challenging- the last section is largely contemporary and very touching, and caused me to go back and re-read the earlier sections, and realise what an amazing success this book is - intentionally fitting form to content over the centuries. Combining prose, poetry, play, diary and real historical events, this audacious tour de force from the author of The Gallows Pole and The Perfect Golden Circle traces the story of St Cuthbert - unofficial patron saint of the North of England - through the centuries and the voices of ordinary people. Recipient of the Roger Deakin Award and first published by Bluemoose Books, Myers' novel The Gallows Pole was published to acclaim in 2017 and was winner of the Walter Scott Prize 2018 - the world's largest prize for historical fiction. I have spent a lot of time working out how the words are arranged on the page, and there is lots of white space within it.The story of Saint Cuthbert, ‘the patron saint of Northern England’ is told through the experiences of a tenth century orphan, Ediva, who is travelling with a band of monks on their long journey with Cuddy’s corpse at the time of the Viking raids, the abused wife of a violent Durham stonemason in the fourteenth century, an Oxford historian straight out of an M R James story attending the opening of Cuthbert’s tomb in Durham Cathedral in 1827 (this section I found less convincing than the others and one particular glaring anachronism served to underline that the narrative voice here wasn’t quite believable) and Michael Cuthbert, a labourer working on the cathedral in 2019. 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.

There is a continuum which Myers weaves through an ancient folklore which challenges the powerful and defends the vulnerable. The voice of the saint remains with us throughout, there to receive the prayers of those who believe in his legend and longevity. If all of this sounds too heady or terribly uninteresting, there is good news: The five narratives which contribute to the book's overarching story are excellent.Book two is delivered in monolithic slabs of language, monumental as the blocks of stone that made the cathedral itself.