ST CUTHBERT, known affectionately as Cuddy, is in effect the patron saint of the north of England, his tomb in Durham Cathedral an important site of pilgrimage. Yet Cuthbert himself had no connection with Durham; indeed, he probably never visited “Dunholme”, the uninhabited hill surrounded on three sides by a deep river gorge where his remains now rest.

Benjamin Myers’s account of the saint’s afterlife on the journey towards and then at Durham defies ready characterisation. His publishers call it a novel, but, while Cuthbert’s memory and legacy underpin each page, the four-part book adopts, teasingly, a range of literary genres and typographical devices, as well as plural authorial voices.

In Book I, Cuddy, the dead saint, speaks to Ediva, a young woman adopted by the haliwerfolc, the “people of the saint” as their cook and helper. That community carried the relics of their saint in his wooden coffin away from Viking raids on the island of Lindisfarne until eventually Ediva helps them to find a home for Cuddy on the hill like an island in 995.

Book II tells of masons repairing the cathedral stonework in 1346 and makes the saint an actor in condemning an abusive husband. The third book offers a pastiche of an M. R. James ghost story, set in 1827, when a sceptical professor finds his confidence in science challenged at the opening of the saint’s tomb. And, in the final part, a young labourer, Michael Cuthbert, has his own encounter with the numinous when unexpectedly given work in the cathedral while his mother lies dying at home.

Myers’s prose and verse are arresting, if sometimes rather pretentious. He speaks powerfully about a well-loved northern figure. But the real Cuthbert can best be found in the anonymous biography written on Lindisfarne just after the first relocation of his much travelled bones.

The Revd Dr Sarah Foot is Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Oxford, and Dean Designate.

Cuddy
Benjamin Myers
Bloomsbury £20
(978-1-5266-3150-3)
Church Times Bookshop £18