On a spring evening in 1827, pettish historian Professor Forbes Fawcett-Black II packs his valise to make a journey north to Durham Cathedral. Fawcett-Black has a horror of anywhere north of Oxford – “The north to me,” he grumbles, “has always appeared a land of coughing chimneys, blotched babies, vile ale, wet wool, and cloying clouds” – but now he is lured to observe the proposed exhumation of the remains of St Cuthbert, whose grave within the cathedral has for centuries been the focus of intense devotion. The opening of the saint’s coffin reveals – but what does it reveal? And how in any case can we believe the fragmentary testimony of this historian? After all, his experience at Durham brings on the “vapours” in the form of a thoroughgoing breakdown.
St Cuthbert, or Cuddy, is the de facto patron saint of northern England, and in his eponymous novel Benjamin Myers traces not the saint’s story but his echo, his shadow, the impact that a potent idea of connectedness – however fragmentary – can have on a region and on a people. This very fragmentation of St Cuthbert’s story, indeed, reveals Myers’s true subject to be the plasticity of history itself, as the shards of a story fly through time, endlessly assembled, disassembled and reassembled, so they retain power and tremendous potential.
And the novel itself reflects this spinning, tumbling form. It too is fragmentary, leaping across chasms of time and space. A chorus of testimonies is supplied, to fill in the gaps and silences of official histories: the “rag tag menagerie of wandering souls” calling from 10th-century Lincolnshire as they carry Cuddy’s remains across northern England; tales of violence in a 14th-century stonemason’s family as the saint’s shrine assumes a new shape nearby; the stones of Durham Cathedral witnessing Cromwellian desecration as a sacred space becomes a violent prison.
Benjamin Myers has long made the stories of northern England his own: The Offing (2019) renders the region as a nation, apart and distinct; The Gallows Pole (2017) tells a bleak tale of injustice in 18th-century Yorkshire. Cuddy continues this journey of exploration, but now the form is more experimental and the writing more incantatory, as Myers traces just some of the manifold threads of history to remarkable effect.
