Leaping across chasms of time and space

Published date18 March 2023
Publication titleIrish Times (Dublin, Ireland)
The opening of the saint's coffin reveals - but what does it reveal? And how in any case can we believe the fragmentary testimony of this historian? After all, his experience at Durham brings on the "vapours" in the form of a thoroughgoing breakdown

St Cuthbert, or Cuddy, is the de facto patron saint of northern England, and in his eponymous novel Benjamin Myers traces not the saint's story but his echo, his shadow, the impact that a potent idea of connectedness - however fragmentary - can have on a region and on a people. This very fragmentation of St Cuthbert's story, indeed, reveals Myers's true subject to be the plasticity of history itself, as the shards of a story fly through time, endlessly assembled, disassembled and reassembled, so they retain power and tremendous potential.

And the novel itself reflects this spinning, tumbling form. It too is fragmentary, leaping across chasms of time and space. A chorus of testimonies is supplied, to fill in the gaps and silences of...

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