2024/119: Cuddy — Benjamin Myers

Granted, death comes only once,
and they are alarmed,
but I’m glad you’re here now, dear friend,
to join me in the amber of the moment,
holding my cracked and callused hand
as we stride forth into the fevered hinterland. [p.5]

Told in many voices (including that of Durham Cathedral) and spanning more than a millennium, Cuddy won the Goldsmiths prize in 2023 and the Winston Graham Historical Prize in 2024. Beginning with St Cuthbert -- 'Cuddy' -- dying on the tiny isle of Inner Farne in 687 AD, it continues with the story of the Haliwerfolc, the "folk of the holy man" who carried his coffin around the north of England for a century, fleeing the Danes; then to a passage that features stonemasons working on Durham Cathedral just before the Black Death; then, darkly, to the use of the post-dissolution cathedral as a prison to house wounded Scottish soldiers after the Battle of Dunbar in 1650; then a ghost story, very much in the style of M R James, set in 1827 when Cuddy's remains were exhumed; and finally the more or less contemporary story of Michael Cuthbert, a labourer working to support his dying mother.

There's a strong sense of northern culture and community, and the landscape around Durham: in some passages I was strongly reminded of Alan Garner. Myers' style varies from almost Anglo-Saxon free verse in Cuddy's prologue, to lavish Victoriana, to Michael's uneducated but strongly felt narration. Each voice is unique and credibly of its time: throughout the novel there's a sense of history tied to place.

Everything is circular: similar characters recur in each section (a woman who's a cook or healer or brewer, an owl-eyed young man, a corrupt monk, a violent husband) and there are secondary characters whose names -- 'Brother Chad, Brother Hunred, Brother Stitheard, Brother Eadmer'; 'Harry, Frankie, Ed and Stoddard' -- seem to tie them to earlier iterations. And Cuddy is a presence throughout, gentle and humane, speaking to those in need. 

I liked this very much: it felt rooted in the history and landscape of north-east England, and in honest faith, and in changeless humanity. 

I was still soil-sunk then, not yet tall, not yet holy. Not yet a quarried arrangement of a singular vision set in stone and called a cathedral. Now you might call me a coffin, a mausoleum for the many. [p. 270]