This year will see adaptations of two of Benjamin Myers’ previous novels hit our screens, with brutal historical fiction The Gallows Pole becoming a six-part BBC series directed by the incomparable Shane Meadows and The Offing – an invigorating celebration of life, art and carpe diem spirit – transformed into a film starring Helena Bonham Carter. Good luck to anyone who attempts to help his latest novel make that leap.
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.
Rich, rewarding, dark and comic, Cuddy is – like the building at its heart – a magnificent construction.
Cuddy, Benjamin Myers (Bloomsbury)
Price: £20. Info: here
words BEN WOOLHEAD
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