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As the book moves from 687 to 2019 in centuries-long leaps, there are less obvious themes which run throughout. The triumphant new novel from the Walter Scott Prize-winning author of The Gallows Pole and The Offing. 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. This is always near impossible to pull off and, while I admire the ambition, I feel like it could have been pared back a little.
So much so that in one short section that is presented to us as a play, the cathedral has a speaking part. Cuthbert was first buried on Lindisfarne, an island off the Northumbrian coast and scene of the first Viking raid on England. It was less about Cuddy than about the people surrounding his memory and the place embodying it, and it grew increasingly distant from the initial historical pull as it got closer to the present. The middle two parts less so though I did enjoy Myers's take on the 19th century epistolary style (well, diary, not letters). Overall it read a bit like a guided tour of the points of interest at the cathedral (which I remembered from mine--would it have been less obvious otherwise?Myers reworks these stories to give us a masterpiece deserving of a place on this year’s Booker Prize longlist. In some ways, what stood out for me apart from the quality of the writing was the gentle exploration of faith and intimations of the possibility of the divine. It was particularly satisfying that the main POV character is a female disciple named Ediva, a foundling who had visions, including of the church where Cuthbert would finally be buried after centuries of nomadism.
After having adjusted to the wild prose poem of the first section, and then enjoying the lyrical medieval romp of the second section, I was disappointed that the remaining sections grew increasingly conventional with more occasional bursts of beauty.Following the Battle of Dunbar three thousand Scotsmen were imprisoned in the Cathedral, 1700 of them died. Just enough detail has been changed in real life locations that it annoys me, unable to tell if the author has done it deliberately or just didn't get it right in the first place. I've read several of Benjamin Myres books and haven't been able to put them down, but not this one, not for me, I'm afraid. Section 1, a kind of epic poem telling the story of the Haliwerfolc, a group of dedicated monks and others who carried Cuddy's body around the north to help it avoid desecration by the invading vikings, is glorious.
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. A controversial combination of biography and novel, Richard (2010) was a bestseller and chosen as a Sunday Times book of the year. But, they are of course linked by a shared sense of place and a history which ultimately binds them together, if not as seamlessly as one might expect.Cuthbert was – and is – a figurehead for the North East as he was perhaps the most prominent religious figure in the North to endure down the centuries.
The book about the 19th century Oxford professor who comes to Durham to witness the exhumation of Cuddy was in my opinion the least strong of all, but the last book was so moving and beautiful that I need to give five stars anyway. He is the author of ten books, including The Offing , which was an international bestseller and selected for the Radio 2 Book Club; The Gallows Pole , which won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction and has been adapted as a BBC series by Shane Meadows; Beastings which was awarded the Portico Prize for Literature, and Pig Iron which won the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize. Myers creates characters and voices so absorbing that when the timeline jumps forward you are reluctant to leave them, only for the next protagonist to become the centre of your world until it is time to move on again. There was some real skill in the period writing, but the final section a) needed editing, it was flabby, and b) was directionless, and this in turn, made me wonder what the point of the whole was meant to be. 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.Which sounds strange when you realise that the book starts on a small island near Lindisfarne with Cuthbert’s death (AD687). The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. There’s also a brief interlude which recounts the desperate experiences of Scottish soldiers imprisoned in the cathedral after the battle of Montrose in 1650. I bought this on a whim after having visited Lindisfarne, Cuddy’s Cave, and Durham for the first time this year and it was so fun to explore the story of Cuthbert through the ages. In fact, most of Cuthbert’s story takes place after his death, when he is exhumed and moved to safety.