The Perfect Golden Circle
Benjamin Myers (Bloomsbury, £16.99)
CThey’re troubled men, allergic to authority and convention
ROP-CIRCLE theorists (and some arable farmers) should probably look away now. This imaginative novel tells of the hot summer of 1989, when oddballs Calvert and Redbone travelled the huge cornfields and ancient barrows of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex in a foetid VW campervan, strapping planks of wood to their feet to create elaborate patterns with such names as ‘Cuckoo Spittle Thought Bubble’.
Afterwards comes the hilarious press coverage: ‘These patterns could be willingly created by unknown visiting beings in order to communicate coded messages.’ Or this from a farmer happily charging tourists: ‘We’ve had professors, foreign tourists, all sorts of weird buggers… I don’t mind whoever is creating these things being in my fields because they never make a fuss and they don’t damage my wheat.’
Calvert and Redbone have a strict code of conduct and never snap a single blade of corn, nor do they damage habitat if they can help it. Above all, they don’t discuss their work. ‘Fuel the myth and strive for beauty’ is their mantra. They seek the status of mythology, not celebrity.
Nor is the project merely for larks; they’re troubled men, allergic to authority and convention. Calvert is a former SAS officer tormented by an explosion in the
Falklands; Redbone is a grubby musician bent out of shape by drugs or, more cheaply, mushrooms (‘God’s own sweeties’). The exquisite combination of solitude, physical toil, communing with prehistoric life and being out when ‘everything feels elastic in the gloaming’, ‘planets turn and blaze and burn’ and ‘small mammals scuttle and scurry through the subterranean kingdom’ is their motivation. The reader, too, is swept up in their exhilaration of the vivid imagery of the vast, ancient landscape and the fleeting magic created within it.
Calvert and Redbone are eco-warriors, forerunners of Extinction Rebellion, although they would hate the crowds and middle-class vibe. When they break into bitter rants about the landowning class, war or climate change, it’s not clear whether it is they or the author speaking; a contrived lecture about melting glaciers and flooded fens strikes a rare clunky note in otherwise lyrical, funny and original writing.