A ‘curious atheist’ tells a visionary tale

by Benjamin Myers

464pp, Bloomsbury, (0844 871 1514), RRP£20, ebook £14

T£16.99

What a marvellous subject for a novel! Benjamin Myers traces the afterlives of St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne – the “Cuddy” of the title – as a small “queer community” of faithful acolytes protects his mortal remains from the “devil Dane” – Vikings – until a resting place is found for them in the grandeur of Durham’s cathedral.

The 19th century brings archaeologists – professional sceptics with shovels – believers in “the physical rather than the liturgical”, desperate to debunk the myth of Cuddy’s incorruptible corpse. And yet the cult of St Cuthbert survives into the 21st century. Latter-day stonemasons still labour to preserve the work of their medieval precursors.

Myers ranges from the 7th century to the 21st, memorialising St Cuthbert and his acolytes in poetry and prose, some of it his own, some of it a pastiche of the styles of the period, and some of it pulled together in artfully arranged quotations from other authors, historical and modern.

In the medieval chapters, Myers finds a register full of gruff Anglo-Saxon monosyllables – “pluff ”, “skeel”, “pluked” – that evokes a convincingly pre-Norman world. He writes of the preindustrial landscapes of northern England with real feeling, as they might have seemed to someone for whom they were still enchanted.

By contrast, his attempt to evoke the prose of a blundering academic reads too much like a poor parody of MR James. The 1820s are surely too early for anyone to mistake “nauseous” for “nauseated”, and “quote” for “quotation”. What Christian before 1997 described his religion as a “belief system”?

I am not sure Myers, who dubs himself a “curious atheist”, has managed to paint a convincing picture of the world as it appears to someone for whom saints and devils are no mere metaphors, for whom all life is lived under the shadow of a literal eternity. Unable to celebrate precisely what his characters celebrate, he is reduced to the etiolated modern clichés: “generosity, compassion”.

His strongest chapter is the one set in the present day, with a young man, a school dropout, setting off from caring for a dying mother to work as a labourer at the cathedral. There is real power and pathos to young Michael Cuthbert’s discovery of the cathedral and the saint it houses, the reverence with which he utters those unfamiliar words: “chantry, revestry, presbytery, dado.”