Cuddy

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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. Well I was primed by having read and re-read the Brontë sisters’ books, and a number of books about… York St John University announces 2019 honorary graduates". York St John University. 11 October 2019.

Pig Iron (2012) was set in the traveller/gypsy community of the north-east of England and was the first to be published under his full name Benjamin Myers. Published by Bluemoose Books, it won the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize [8] and was longlisted for 3:AM Magazine.com's 'Novels of the Year' [9] and runner-up in The Guardian's 'Not The Booker Prize', [10] in the same year. I have not read any books by Baenjamin Myers before but so I approached this novel cautiously particularly as its main plot was about St Cuthbert and how he reached his final resting place in Durham Cathedral. Breaking the book up into sections, each one a different style, is an interesting concept but badly executed poetry and some of the worst "Scottish" dialogue I've ever read in a small play that forms the Interlude stops me from enjoying it. Bley Griffiths, Eleanor. "BBC announces new Shane Meadows drama The Gallows Pole, based on 'the biggest fraud in British history' ". Radio Times. Archived from the original on 19 May 2021 . Retrieved 24 May 2021.Myers, Benjamin (2021). Male Tears. London, UK: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-5266-1134-5. OCLC 1238056757. Cuddy is a return to epic historical fiction and it didn't surprise me to learn that this labour of love took several years in different locations to write. I imagine as a son of the area that Benjamin Myers grew up steeped in the Cuddy mythology. Several more sections follow in which we follow a young girl with her visions of a cathedral and her visitations from Cuthbert (AD995); we live in the shadow of that cathedral (Durham cathedral as we know it) with a woman (AD1346) whose husband is a famous archer but is also abusive and she falls for another, more gentle, man; we read the journal of an Oxford antiquarian (AD1827) as he travels to the north of England (which he despises) to witness the disinterment of a body in the cathedral; and we follow Michael Cuthbert in AD2019 as he cares for his mother and scratches a living as a labourer, eventually finding more stable work at the cathedral. I read the masterful Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn twice. Then I was asked to write a new foreword but had to construct it from memory. It’s the best British true crime account, but I couldn’t step into the world of Fred and Rose West a third time. There’s also a Booker-longlisted title that was so bad I still get angry when I think about it. Writerly loyalty forbids me from naming it.

Griffiths, Neil. "The Republic of Consciousness Prize longlist". TLS. Archived from the original on 21 September 2020. As a journalist he has written about the arts and nature for publications including New Statesman, The Guardian, The Spectator, NME, Mojo, Time Out, New Scientist, Caught By The River, The Morning Star, Vice, The Quietus, Melody Maker and numerous others. Rating this a 3* read tells barely half the story. For a start, nothing about it is middling, or average. So perhaps even rating it all is a futile pursuit. I loved how Cuddy was an element of all of the parts which are spread over history from the 900’s through to 2019, but the way he was referenced was unique each time. There are also recurring motifs such as girls with names that start with E, owls and stonemasons which kept things interesting. Myers characterisation is excellent and the stories overlap, interlink and echo off each other through the years.

This is the third work I have read by Benjamin Myers and again this one did not disappoint. It is poetry and prose, fact and fiction, passionate and discursive: a dash through over a thousand years of history. Cuddy is a shortened form of Cuthbert and refers to St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, a seventh century shepherd boy who became a monk and then prior of Melrose Abbey and finally a hermit on the island of Lindisfarne. This is an experimental novel using a variety of forms. There is indeed poetry, prose, the occasional epistle, dramatic dialogue and bibliographical references woven into it stretching from Bede to modern times (Schama). There are strands running through the book and the past haunts and informs the present. Myers’ lyrical book, which took almost five years to write, stands in a genre of its own. Its constant links of place and Cuthbert’s legacy do more than adhere each section into a novel: they serve as a reminder that we are but custodians of a world we inherited. Cuddy cements Myers’s standing as one of our finest, and most deftly imaginative, writers. The Quietus | Features | Baker's Dozen | The Hills Are Alive With The Sound Of Music: Benjamin Myers' Favourite Music". The Quietus . Retrieved 24 March 2023.