The long journey from Lindisfarne: Cuddy, by Benjamin Myers, reviewed

Benjamin Myers had a lucky break with his 2017 novel, The Gallows Pole. First published by a small indie press, it won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, garnered a two-book deal from Bloomsbury and this year is to be adapted by Shane Meadows as a BBC television series.

He is something of a maverick – his work a mix of Hughesian lyricism and noir violence – and his success has been hard won.  He has been working the literary coal face for almost 20 years, trying every kind of genre while knocking on publishers’ doors and finding them shut. He responded with a new literary movement, the Brutalists – its manifesto: ‘Young, hungry and rejected by the mainstream.’

Bloomsbury has changed all that; and now here he is with Cuddy, a whacking 400-page experimental novel. Based on the life of St Cuthbert, it follows the saint’s progress from his death on the Isle of Farne in 687 to his much visited shrine in Durham cathedral. The quest to find a safe resting place for the saint’s bones, and the building of the cathedral, form the novel’s narrative spine.

Cuddy opens with Myers’s address to ‘Dear friends and readers’ (when did that last happen?) and his notion that ‘novels are surely spell books’. Am I spellbound? A little. The book is a dazzling compendium of styles: poetry, prose, dramatic dialogue and even an epistle or two. I liked the furthering of the story by the interleaving of bibliographical references, from Bede to Simon Schama, which one might usually expect to find either in footnotes or as an appendix, but I suspect that’s because I’m of the ilk who might turn to acknowledgements before the first chapter.