"The Perfect Golden Circle" by Benjamin Myers

 A veteran of the Falklands War (ex SAS) and a Hippy spend their summer designing and creating crop circles.

This novel seems to have an unorthodox narrative structure: each 'chapter' describes the creation of a new crop circle and the reaction to it. Each creation encounters a different sort of challenge. But the narrative progresses through our deeper understanding of each character and of their relationship, of their relationship to and appreciation of their environment, and of the human impulse to create art, even when no-one will ever know their names.

The way the author reveals the characters, step by step, in all their complexities, makes them utterly realistic. It probably helps that there are only two of them (compare, for example, with Black Cake, in which there are at least ten different narrative viewpoints resulting in flimsy two-dimensional characters)

But what blew me away was the author's lyrical prose. I could have included much, much more in the selected quotes below.

Selected quotes:

• "On this particular night the moon is a signet ring held in soft wax and pressed to the black page of the sullen sky." (Alton Kennet Pathway)
• "He whispers the words just loud enough for them to become real. He wraps his tongue around them, and they become poetry in his mouth."  (Alton Kennet Pathway)
• "Licking dirt-dry lips."  (Alton Kennet Pathway)
• "The jigsaw puzzle of their endeavour."  (Alton Kennet Pathway)
• "children tuning in to radios held steady beneath the hot-breath darkness of their duvets." (Alton Kennet Pathway)
• "The flowers will open themselves, their petals peeling back like the pages of a pornographic book until the bee touches their insides." (Trapping St Edmunds Solstice Pendulum)
• "There was something about suffering serious flesh wounds, and the subsequent slow and painful recovery in which he watched his weeping flesh slowly knit back together beneath a thousand crusted dressing, that made the prospect of eating another creature feel too close to cannibalism. Suddenly the idea of meat being chewed and then sitting in his stomach was nothing short of repulsive. The spent life of another once-living thing inside him like that"  (Trapping St Edmunds Solstice Pendulum)
• "If I've learned anything it's that beauty is more important than conflict. Beauty above all else."  (Trapping St Edmunds Solstice Pendulum)
• "The sea is a border, a boundary, and living on an island like this makes us think we're something special. But we're not. We're just scared, that's all. We're scared of the world. And that breeds arrogance and ignorance, and ignorance signals the death of decency."  (Trapping St Edmunds Solstice Pendulum)
• "Purple lightning strikes a pitchfork fracture with violent precision in the evening sky. ... Then comes the thunder, growling like a cornered dog, rumbling like a two-day hunger." (Bracklebury Dodman)
• "There's nothing wrong with dogs ... They're not daft. I've never met a single dog who has a job or has to pay taxes." (Bracklebury Dodman) Umm ... sheep dogs? Police dogs? Sniffer dogs?
• "War is organised confusion ... At best it is that. And at its worst it is beleaguered kids shivering on a rock in a spiteful ocean. with nothing but cigarettes and antique weaponry with which to fight against elitist and indulged trained killers, all for little but the folly of others far away." (Bracklebury Dodman)
• "The road of life is full of potholes and the best that anyone can hope for is that the smooth planes in between are frequent and prolonged." (High Bassett Butter Barrel Whirlpool)
• "Beneath the skin of the earth is the curve of its skull. It is the foundation upon which all life sits. Worms crawl from the fissures in the skull to turn the earth that is the skin. The worms of England. They convert death and decay into the composted soil from which all plants and trees and crops grow." (Throstle Henge Asteroid Necklance)
• "Hoaxes? ... Who said anything about hoaxes? We're not trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes ... We're operating on a different plane, my brother." ((Untitled) Bronze Fox Mandala)
• "They believe in money but we believe in something greater: truth and beauty. That will put us on the right  side of history." ((Untitled) Bronze Fox Mandala)

One of the best books I have read this year. An almost perfect novel. Beautiful language and utterly believable characters.

Also by Benjamin Myers and reviewed in this blog:

Pig Iron

July 2023; 241 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God