Cuddy

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Fiction Uncovered Prize Longlist 2015". Jerwood Arts. 12 May 2015. Archived from the original on 21 January 2021. Cook, Jude (21 August 2019). "The Offing by Benjamin Myers review – poignant story of an unlikely friendship". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 3 January 2020– via www.theguardian.com. Anderson, Hephzibah (19 March 2023). "Cuddy by Benjamin Myers review – a polyphonic hymn to the north-east". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712 . Retrieved 24 March 2023. Whenever I am overcome with existential dread I, like many others, reach for the PG Wodehouse – currently about thrice daily. I only have to think of the title Eggs, Beans and Crumpets and I laugh. Or Viz comic, which is the vocabulary of my childhood. 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.

Cuddy, Myers’s eighth novel, is a polyphonic hymn to a very specific landscape and its people. At the same time, it deepens his standing as an arresting chronicler of a broader, more mysterious seam of ancient folklore that unites the history of these isles as it’s rarely taught. The monastery on Lindisfarne in the 8th century would have been the height of modernity, in terms of how the monks lived, the comforts they were afforded, the theological and moral discussions that would have had. We’re probably only somewhere between fifty and a hundred generations away from that time, and Durham Cathedral is living proof that we were not living like primitives one thousand years ago: we had vision. We understood mathematics, engineering, and were bold thinkers. It wasn’t all scrofula, trebuchets and turnips for breakfast. The aforementioned AD1827 section provides comic relief in the form of a rather caricatured academic snob from The Other Place (although it neatly twists into an effective Victorian ghost story):You'd be right in being confused. I am still confused and I've finished it! But I can recognise that this is a step up from what Myers has written before, and that it will bring him to the attention of people who perhaps haven't read his work before.

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. Myers grew up in Belmont, County Durham, [2] and was a pupil at the estate's local comprehensive school where he become interested in reading and skateboarding. [3] Myers, Benjamin (2005). Green Day: American idiots & the new punk explosion. Church Stretton: Independent Music Press. ISBN 0-9539942-9-5. OCLC 64553821. Griffiths, Neil. "The Republic of Consciousness Prize longlist". TLS. Archived from the original on 21 September 2020. Cuddy is an extraordinary book. Is it my favourite by Myers? No. But there's still a lot to love here. The book is told in single stories that make a whole - each section has a different format and style, and different characters. This type of novel is very hard to get right and I don't often love them (it's why I've never got on with the David Mitchell books I've tried for example!). It's going to be hard to find a reader who loves every section equally and there will inevitably be highs and lows.

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Along the way we meet brewers and masons, archers and academics, monks and labourers, their visionary voices and stories echoing through their ancestors and down the ages. 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. 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. York St John University announces 2019 honorary graduates". York St John University. 11 October 2019.

Stewart, Ethan (2 December 2020). "A Look at the '80s and '90s UK Straight Edge Hardcore Scenes" . Retrieved 7 December 2020. 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. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne (St. Cuthbert) is a central character in the book. Which sounds strange when you realise that the book starts on a small island near Lindisfarne with Cuthbert’s death (AD687). This is prose poetry which is the first of several literary forms used through the book (watch out also for stories told through quotes from text books, plays in which a building is a character, a Victorian journal/diary and Myers’ intense prose). Myers, Benjamin (2006). System of a Down: right here in Hollywood. Church Stretton: Independent Music. ISBN 978-0-9549704-6-8. OCLC 63136435.The Gallows Pole - Watch the trailer for Shane Meadows' new drama". www.bbc.co.uk. 19 May 2023. Archived from the original on 31 May 2023 . Retrieved 31 May 2023. 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 admit I was a little daunted by the style when I first started but then Gallows Pole unnerved me to begin with.