Cuddy (2023)
Why this one?
This book won the 2023 Goldsmiths Prize, awarded annually since 2013 for fiction that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form”. Its first couple of winners (How to be both and A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing) both also won the Women’s Prize, and were two of my favourite winners in my recent run through all the winners of that particular prize. I’m keen to start following the Goldsmiths Prize in future and thought that its most recent winner would be a good place to start. I’d also heard a LOT of effusive praise for it around and about, so reckoned I had to get around to it at some point!
Benjamin Myers (1976- ; active 2004-) was born in Durham, England. In his teens, he was a member of the local punk band Sour Face, and began writing for the weekly music paper Melody Maker. Alongside his journalism, he also published books on the likes of John Lydon, Green Day and The Clash. He published his first novel, The Book of Fuck, in 2004, but it was his second Richard: A Novel (2010) that brought wider attention. It was a fictionalized novel told from the perspective of the Manic Street Preachers member Richey Edwards, who went missing in 1995 and (in the absence of any evidence) was legally declared dead in 2008. It received some criticism (partly for its timing) from the surviving band members.
His third novel, 2012's Pig Iron, won the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize, and his fifth, The Gallows Pole (2017) won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. The latter was adapted for the BBC by Shane Meadows (This is England) and aired in 2023. His 2019 novel The Offing is being adapted as a film by director Jessica Hobbs (Broadchurch, The Crown) starring Helena Bonham Carter. Alongside his literary novels he has also published crime fiction, short stories and poetry. He is married to fellow author Adelle Stripe.
Thoughts, etc.
Cuddy begins with the death of its eponymous hero, St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, in 687, and thereafter takes us on a wild and eclectic ride through the centuries, giving us an alternative history of the North-East of England , over which the venerated saint’s influence looms large. Casting an equally grand shadow over the novel is Durham Cathedral, Cuddy’s burial place. The novel is split into four sections and an interlude, the first of which (‘Saint Cuddy’, taking place in 995) follows a band of monks as they carry the saint’s corpse around the North for decades (his body having been evacuated from the island of Lindisfarne in order to protect it from desecration by invading Danes). It is told in part through the voice of a young female orphan, Ediva, who is taken in by the moniks, in part in poetic fragments (some of which allow Cuddy to ‘speak’ from beyond the grave) and in part through a beautifully well-assembled collage of exerpts from real historical texts (from Bede through to modern-day guidebooks) that tell the story of Cuthbert’s life. In this section, the cathedral is merely a concept, though it exists in the visions of Ediva.
Its second book jumps to 1346 (‘The Mason’s Mark’), in which the cathedral is now complete bar embellishments and Eda, wife of the celebrated archer and terrible abusive husband Fletcher Bullard, is drawn to the stonemason Francis Rolfe. There follows a brief interlude set in 1650, in which ‘The Cathedral Speaks’ in the form of a theatrical script, telling of its present use/abuse as a refuge for Scots soldiers, who are slowly starving to death within its hallowed walls. The third book proper (‘The Corpse in the Cathedral’) is set in 1827, again shifting tone and style to the form of a Victorian gothic novel (others have referenced M. R. James) in which the arrogant but unwittingly hilarious professor Forbes Fawcett-Black is called to Durham to participate in the exhumation of Cuddy’s corpse. Finally we’re brought (almost) up to date with the final section, ‘Daft Lad’, set in 2019 and focusing on Michael Cuthbert, a working class local, working zero-hours manual jobs for a pittance while he cares for his dying mother. He finds himself called to the Cathedral for a more permanent job and encounters a different world to that in which he has grown up.
There’s so much to say about this book that I hardly know where to start. The Goldsmiths Prize is evidently awarded to books that are doing something new with the novel form, but I don’t think in this case it’s just about the formal innovation on display. Its style-hopping is performed with magnificent aplomb but isn’t in itself original - this kind of playful approach to form goes back to Ulysses (if not further) and every specific form in the book has multiple antecedents (the historical source patchwork in ‘Saint Cuddy’ reminded me a lot of George Saunders’ similar - but even more willd - use of the form in the brilliant Lincoln in the Bardo, for example.) The innovation, or ‘new thing’ Myers is doing, feels more like something on a quasi-spiritual level, underpinning that superficial layer of literary metafiction with a deep seriousness of purpose in evoking something deep and mystical about the ‘Spirit of the North’.
What’s most impressive, really, is that in such an ambitious book both in terms of theme and form, it’s possibly to simply sit back and enjoy the ride. There’s fun to be had in trying to decode the deeper meaning and intricate connections between the stories woven by Myers, and in spotting the literary influences that inform the genre-hopping. But over and above all of this, it’s a book in which just luxuriating the joy of an author absolutely on fire is the main pleasure. The storytelling is top notch and the linguistic play never strays into the realms of ‘difficulty’ - it’s always clear what’s going on in the moment and there’s no willful complexity (at least on the surface!)
It’s also a book that (for me at least) gets better as it goes along. Each leap marks a surprising shift, from the hazy poeticism of the first book to the stark realistic romp of the second, via a dramatic interlude to a punchy satire in the third and a heartbreaking piece of modern humane lit-fic in the last. And with each section you get the benefit of the accumulated world built, centred on the haunting but ultimately benevolent influence of Cuddy on forming a kind of local character over the centuries. It builds a rich and complex picture of a world, to the point that reading ‘Daft Lad’ on its own would have had far less impact without the benefit of its situation at the end of this grand narrative. The most memorable passage of the entire book for me has Michael on a grim building site, telling ‘beautiful lies’ to his dying housebound mother on the phone about an imagined nature he can ‘see’ - its hugely affecting as a piece in itself, but also carries echoes of the saint’s care for the natural world (and for our fellow creatures - both human and otherwise) and stands in stark contrast to the brutalised world of abattoirs and asbestos-laden building sites in which Michael exists, a thread of Cuddy’s humanity peeking through into our ruined landscape.
While the heart of the novel is certainly exemplified by its final section, for me (in contrast to many reviewers, it seems) its highlight was the smart satire of ‘The Corpse in the Cathedral’. Its by turns repellant and hilarious central character only grudgingly makes his way to Durham, giving us a whistlestop tour of every anti-Northern prejudice that’s ever manifested through the centuries. A sample passage ends thus:
“The north to me has always appeared a land of coughing chimneys, blotched babies, vile ale, wet wool and cloying clouds, where all is coated with a slick of grime, a skein of grease, and such concepts as aspiraion, education and betterment extend to an extra pan-load of dripping of a week’s end.”
It’s brilliant, laugh out loud stuff, all the more surprising coming as it does more than half-way into a novel which has largely been rather straight-faced in its seriousness. Fawcett-Black may not have lost his ‘Never the North’ maxim by the end of his section (though he has gained faith, albeit through fear alone) but any readers surely have had any preconceptions checked by the end of this book - in which its search for the soul of that part of England finds something deeply rooted in the natural landscape, in humanity and care for our fellow ‘travellers’ and in a form of faith that isn’t straightforward Christianity, but a rather specific and humane spirituality informed by the veneration of the long-dead Saint Cuddy.
Score
9.5
What a remarkable book this is. I can’t pretend to have fully comprehended everything Myers was trying to say in this multi-faceted and magnificent epic, but I’d wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone.
Next up
Onto some more Netgalley books, I think…
