Cuddy by Benjamin Myers (2023)

The novel is comprised of three sections in three time periods. The first is 635 AD. The narrator is EDIVA, a teenaged girl who works as a cook for a travelling group of monks and believers who are carrying the remains of Saint Cuthbert around the North of England as they attempt to evade the Danish invaders. They are the last of generations going back decades who have carried out this task. 

The novel at times leaves these characters to examine the life of Cuthbert, a monk who was educated in the Borders (Southern Scotland) and came to live on Lindisfarne, an island cut off from the mainland of England twice a day due to tides. When the Danes invaded England, Cuthbert was forced to flee with the other monks and ended up doing a penance on an even smaller island, eventually dying there. His remains were deemed saintly due to his body’s supposed lack of deterioration and his coffin was carried for almost a hundred years around the North Of England, where a cult grew up around him, called ‘haliwerfolk’. It’s one of these groups of believers whom we meet in the section set in 635, and in essence it tells how they came to stay in the place which would become Durham, England. EDIVA is a cook but an intelligent girl who is well aware of the dangers of being too ‘Christian’ in an era prone to Danish invasion. But she and the others have visions of St Cuthbert and his resting place, and pursue their visions. EDIVA is befriended by a servant boy travelling with them, ‘OWL BOY’ who has enormous, serious eyes and who does whatever tasks are required. He is besotted with EDIVA but at the section’s end we are not convinced they were fated to be together. The ‘haliwerfolc’ stop, finally, intent on carrying out their plan of founding a great cathedral to house Cuthbert, who was a modest and unassuming man they have elevated to near Christ like status. 

In the second section, set in 1827, the narrator is Professor FORBES FAWCETT, a historian and archaeologist who is an atheist. He arrives in Durham at the behest of Reverend Parnell, in order to witness the opening of St Cuthbert’s coffin for ‘investigative purposes’. He does not believe in ghosts or magic, but soon feels himself terrified by the presence of a youth he finds both off putting and physically beautiful. FAWCETT has dark dreams with words whispered in his ear and sees ghostly pilgrims passing through the night in his room, all spectres who haunt him and drive him to madness. He sees the ‘SULLEN BOY’ as he calls him, and is told to ‘Let History Lie’ meaning the coffin of St Cuthbert must be undisturbed. But he is powerless to stop the excavation which goes ahead incompetently and which reveals Cuthbert’s remains lie at one corner of the coffin, more or less fallen to dust.