Cuddy and Circe
Jul. 14th, 2024 05:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustIn the Guardian, an article by writer Benjamin Myers considers how Durham - his "home town" - has changed "during 14 years of Tory rule". It's one of a short series on the theme, which strikes me as a little random, both the question itself and Myers's answer, but never mind. I liked: "Gone is the Marks & Spencer where I first discovered escalators and hummus."
There are a number of differences between the print and online versions of the article, starting from the headline, but let's not go down that rabbit hole; this post isn't about that, although the "escalators and hummus" made me feel (slightly) more tempted by Benjamin Myers's novel Cuddy.
This is Cuddy:
- more formally, Saint Cuthbert of Farne, as depicted by Fenwick Lawson, and stationed at Lindisfarne Priory. While I was waiting to show my card for admission to the priory, I overheard the custodian answering the ladies ahead of me: yes, that was where the bodies were found, the altar would have been just over there. And yes, the ruins had been in the care of English Heritage for quite some time, but it wasn't impossible to get in at night, you could climb over the wall from the garden of the pub, people did occasionally ... I wasn't unduly alarmed by this talk of bodies on altars, because I was pretty sure we were talking about a series of crime novels set on Holy Island: I had read the first few chapters of the first one, as a free sample somewhere, and felt no urge to get hold of and read the rest of it.
When my turn came, I asked the custodian, who confirmed that this was, indeed, what they were taoling about. He had read the books, he said, because he made a point of reading books about Holy Island, but he hadm't thought much of them. His preference was for non-fictionm he explained, but - and he produced his current reading matter - right now he was reading Benjamin Myers's Cuddy, and finding it quite dense going. But he persevered.
I was disproportionately cheered by this unscheduled book talk, and had to bite my tongue not to launch into enthusing about my own current reading (there were more visitors behind me, awaiting admission). I had already started Madeline Miller's Circe, which I had bought a dew days earlier in Berwick: I had been looking for her The Song of Achilles, whichboybear had recomended, and found this instead. Without that pointer, I probably wouldn't have been tempted: the back cover quotes The Times: "Miller's Me-too era, kickass portrait of a woman trying to defy the men and Fates array against her ..." and I am not drawn to the feminist-retelling, all history must be the same, version of the past. I enjoy the strangeness, not the familiarity. Which only reinforces my belief that you should never look at the back cover until you are at least halfway through the book, because while Circe is, I suppose, as described, it also presents the Gods and Titans of myth in a way that was both entirely new and entirely familiar. I don't know enough about Greek myth to know how much is invention, how much has a Classical - or post-Classical - source, but it felt entirely convincing: as if it was both a single organic invention and the result of deep knowledge of its source material. It is, in short, one of those books that you want to talk to people about.
There are a number of differences between the print and online versions of the article, starting from the headline, but let's not go down that rabbit hole; this post isn't about that, although the "escalators and hummus" made me feel (slightly) more tempted by Benjamin Myers's novel Cuddy.
This is Cuddy:
- more formally, Saint Cuthbert of Farne, as depicted by Fenwick Lawson, and stationed at Lindisfarne Priory. While I was waiting to show my card for admission to the priory, I overheard the custodian answering the ladies ahead of me: yes, that was where the bodies were found, the altar would have been just over there. And yes, the ruins had been in the care of English Heritage for quite some time, but it wasn't impossible to get in at night, you could climb over the wall from the garden of the pub, people did occasionally ... I wasn't unduly alarmed by this talk of bodies on altars, because I was pretty sure we were talking about a series of crime novels set on Holy Island: I had read the first few chapters of the first one, as a free sample somewhere, and felt no urge to get hold of and read the rest of it.
When my turn came, I asked the custodian, who confirmed that this was, indeed, what they were taoling about. He had read the books, he said, because he made a point of reading books about Holy Island, but he hadm't thought much of them. His preference was for non-fictionm he explained, but - and he produced his current reading matter - right now he was reading Benjamin Myers's Cuddy, and finding it quite dense going. But he persevered.
I was disproportionately cheered by this unscheduled book talk, and had to bite my tongue not to launch into enthusing about my own current reading (there were more visitors behind me, awaiting admission). I had already started Madeline Miller's Circe, which I had bought a dew days earlier in Berwick: I had been looking for her The Song of Achilles, which
boybear had recomended, and found this instead. Without that pointer, I probably wouldn't have been tempted: the back cover quotes The Times: "Miller's Me-too era, kickass portrait of a woman trying to defy the men and Fates array against her ..." and I am not drawn to the feminist-retelling, all history must be the same, version of the past. I enjoy the strangeness, not the familiarity. Which only reinforces my belief that you should never look at the back cover until you are at least halfway through the book, because while Circe is, I suppose, as described, it also presents the Gods and Titans of myth in a way that was both entirely new and entirely familiar. I don't know enough about Greek myth to know how much is invention, how much has a Classical - or post-Classical - source, but it felt entirely convincing: as if it was both a single organic invention and the result of deep knowledge of its source material. It is, in short, one of those books that you want to talk to people about.
