Cuddy

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The second section, AD995, was the highlight for me with its beautiful poetic prose. And the AD2019 section is very moving. The AD1827 section felt a bit weaker to me as I read it and I started to think the book might lose a star. But the reality is that I got to the end of the book and couldn’t really justify anything other than the full 5 stars. Incorporating poetry, prose, play, diary and real historical accounts to create a novel like no other,Cuddystraddles historical eras - from the first Christian-slaying Viking invaders of the holy island of Lindisfarne in the 8th century to a contemporary England defined by class and austerity. By the age of nine I’d ingested everything by Judy Blume. This was in the north-east during the miners’ strike – quite a masculine climate – so I was laughed at, but I didn’t care, for in Judy’s work lay all the secrets of a mysterious faraway planet: females. In Judy Blume’s work lay all the secrets of a mysterious faraway planet Diana Hendry The long journey from Lindisfarne: Cuddy, by Benjamin Myers, reviewed St Cuthbert’s body, rescued from the ‘devilish Danes’, is carried for hundreds of years to its eventual shrine in Durham cathedral From life in a brutal eighteenth-century coiners gang ( The Gallows Pole) to a late 1980s public obsession with crop circles ( The Perfect Golden Circle); where do you get your limitless inspiration from?

Benjamin Myers' "Offene See" ist das Lieblingsbuch der Unabhängigen 2020". Buch Markt. 7 November 2020. The writing is so beautiful even when some of it makes little sense. As you read you initially feel impressions of the story rather than discerning any plot but as the parts move on the stories become more concrete. After finding some of the earlier parts a bit hard to fully engage with I eventually fell into the story completely and couldn’t stop reading. I found the poetry of Thomas Hardy to be dismal and the prose of DH Lawrence to be overwrought – all those exclamation marks. Expressing this was probably the reason I failed A-level English. But I now recognise both as visionaries who saw far beyond the England they occupied. I particularly admire Lawrence’s novellas, The Fox and The Virgin and the Gypsy. The first part of the novel, Saint Cuddy, is told in the voice of Ediva, an orphan taken in by the monks as a child, now travelling with them as healer, cook and helper as they search for a final resting place for Cuddy’s coffin. Ediva is alive to the rhythms of the landscape in a way that marks her out as different; she also sees visions of the future cathedral – a building “bigger than anything man has ever built, so big it rears up like a mountain, like a great beast” – where the saint will finally be laid to rest.

The Church Times Archive

But through all the changes the one voice that never leaves is that of the saintly Cuthbert who never quite seems to get his wish to be left alone to worship God. Past winners of the Tom-Gallon Trust Award". Society of Authors. 8 May 2020. Archived from the original on 6 August 2020 . Retrieved 27 May 2021. This book was very close to a five star read for me and I think it is definitely a contender for the Booker Prize longlist which is announced on 1 August. Jordison, Sam (15 October 2012). "Not the Booker prize: The winner | Books". The Guardian. theguardian.com . Retrieved 12 August 2014. Cuthbert is a central character linking the stories. But so is the cathedral. So much so that in one short section that is presented to us as a play, the cathedral has a speaking part. A dead person and an inanimate building are the central pillars around which the story flows. And, to a large extent, what we read is the history of the cathedral as it is built, corrupted, invaded and restored. And this story is told via a number of excellent and memorable supporting characters.

This will be incredibly difficult for me to review. My admiration of Benjamin Myers' work is well known, and I think with Cuddy- because it is extremely experimental in style and approach- he has positioned himself more than ever before to be in the running for a longlist nomination on this year's Booker Prize. All in all a fabulous book one I would hope would appear on prize lists such as the Booker prize .The book defiantly classes as a literary novel Dan Jones on The Wolves of Winter “The Dogs are in a mud-wrestling match with history and they bring some moves all of their own to the party”Although the later sections (a second-person account of the construction of Durham Cathedral, a Murder in the Cathedral-type play set in the 1650s, the excavation of his remains in the 1820s, a young man and potential descendant in 2019 Durham named Michael Cuthbert) feel pretty pretentious and less than essential, it's neat that a similar female character (Edith or Edie in later sections) recurs. Myers, Benjamin (13 October 2018). "Benjamin Myers on Durham: 'I spent a lot of time up trees or trespassing on roofs' ". The Guardian . Retrieved 7 December 2020. His novel Beastings (2014) won the Portico Prize For Literature, was the recipient of the Northern Writers’ Award and longlisted for a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Award 2015. Widely acclaimed, it featured on several end of year lists, and was chosen by Robert Macfarlane in The Big Issue as one of his books of 2014. Cuddy is another milestone marking Myers’ versatility as a writer. His most ambitious and structurally complex work to date, it’s composed of four discrete “books”, plus a Prologue and an Interlude. The first, in poetic form, follows the “haliwerfolc” who wandered the north for a century after St Cuthbert’s death in 687, devoutly protecting his body from Viking raiders; the second is a potent tale of forbidden desire and revenge set in 1346; the third comprises the diary entries of a pompous, sneering Victorian academic summoned from Oxford to attend one of the many exhumations of Cuddy’s corpse; and the fourth paints a poignant contemporary portrait of austerity Britain and escaping the daily grind. Over them all looms the imposing edifice of Durham Cathedral, built to house Cuddy’s tomb.

And all the while at the centre sits Durham Cathedral and the lives of those who live and work around this place of pilgrimage - their dreams, desires, connections and communities. It’s a humble orphan girl, not one of the Lindisfarne monks, who is given a vision of Durham cathedralThe tide had retreated late that evening, laying a ledge of grey sand in its wake where all else now… Tom-Gallon Trust Award | Society of Authors – Protecting the rights and furthering the interests of authors". Society of Authors. Archived from the original on 19 July 2014 . Retrieved 12 August 2014.