This book changed my life.

There. Five-word review. There aren’t many books that do that, and this one did. Perhaps slightly unusual for a life-changing book, in that it’s a children’s book (and I read it as an adult), it’s set in Northumberland (which I’d barely even heard of when I read it, let alone visited), and it’s about an obscure 7th-century monk and a dysfunctional 1970s family. But there you go. Life-changing books come in all sorts of strange packages.

As to why it was so life-changing, think on this. My parents are immigrants. They settled in London. Our friends were in London or the south east. So, when we travelled in England, we went to them. Yes, we made the occasional trip further afield, but without a familial sense of where to go and what to visit, we were limited to the most obvious places. Our family trip to Scotland took in Edinburgh, Loch Ness and (for two young boys) an exciting night spent sleeping the back of our estate car when all the B&B places that had ‘vacancy’ signs in the morning had changed them to ‘no vacancy’ signs by the afternoon (for the adults, it was no doubt a hugely uncomfortable and deeply mortifying night, but we thought it was great). Most of England was beyond our knowledge and budget. So, by the time I’d grown up, I really hadn’t visited very much of it.

Going to university meant that I actually met and became friends with some actual English people – and then, quite a few years later, I went and married one. Now, my wife’s family knew quite a lot about England – they’d been here for centuries. And, although undemonstrative, my father-in-law’s patriotism is deeply rooted in the understated nature mysticism of the English: the same sort of feeling that permeates the Piper in the Gates of Dawn chapter of The Wind in the Willows, or the poem Adlestrop.

The other strand to this feeling for place is history: a rootedness in the land and landscape that comes from centuries within it. I can see this but, at root, I can’t feel it: my roots stop with me. But there is a further, deeper connection, and in this book I began to see the hints of that.

St Cuthbert lived in 7th-century Northumbria. He was a miracle-worker, a bishop, a hermit, a man kind to animals and plants and plagued by demons and devils; he was fierce in love and harsh on evil. With eyes turned to God, all other eyes turned to him, pulling, plucking, trying to pinch a little of his holiness from him. In defence, Cuthbert went exile in view, on one of the Farne Islands off the coast of Northumberland, and remained there until called back to act as bishop, although he did manage to return to the island for his final few months of life.

The saint lives. In the book, he stirs, opening up the wounds of pride and angry disbelief in an Oxford professor, lashing him to his duty; this is no plaster saint but a man of danger. This is holiness as whirlwind and fire, burning and breaking, making.

Men are broken, bent things. Sometimes they have to be broken further before they can be remade. This book broke some of me in its fire. I hope it remade that part of me in its image.