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In this folksy, magnetic tale, two outsiders seek healing and enlightenment by creating crop formations in a Wiltshire field . Then comes the upper-cut: “And this is just a nameless field not particularly close to anywhere significant”. Combining precise geometry and motifs from eastern spirituality and Celtic mythology, they’re soon attracting international attention from the media, UFO enthusiasts, dowsers, exorcists and tourists.
Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers Book Review: The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers
Their designs—which they craft without breaking a single stalk of wheat so that their guerrilla work is art, not destruction—attracts worldwide attention and the speculation of conspiracy theorists and UFO hunters, certain these crop circles are a sign that a life force from beyond Earth is trying to send humans a message. Together, where “no signs of modern civilisation are to be seen”, they find “new mythologies waiting to be spun”. The thing about The Perfect Golden Circle is that it is all-consuming and in a way that shows the masterful talent Myers has as a raconteur. While Redbone lives in an old camper van, is immersed in the crust punk scene and prone to visions hallucinogenic and otherwise, Calvert is a solitary SAS veteran, battle scarred inwardly as well as outwardly from his service in the Falklands. Benjamin Myers’ influences are clear — David Peace’s northern brutalism is evident and there are suggestions of Salinger and Golding butPig Iron’ssavage vision is his alone.Moving and exhilarating, tender and slyly witty, The Perfect Golden Circle is a captivating novel about the futility of war, the descruction of the English countryside, class inequality — and the power of beauty to heal trauma and fight power.
The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers review – grand
Sign our petition to keep people in their homes Urgent action is needed to prevent even more people being pushed into homelessness. Momentarily the land is an undeveloped photograph and time is rendered meaningless, and both Redbone and Calvert are aware that they are part of a long lineage of men and women who have stood in these very fields in rapt astonishment for thousands of years, infatuated and intrigued by the magic of the sky at night, and feeling the smallness of their lives and the preciousness of their planetary home.They embody a counter-tradition: the pagan, anarchistic ruralism so vividly channelled in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, or David Rudkin’s Penda’s Fen, or by rogue art groups such as English Heretic and Folklore Tapes. Every 10 minutes or so, t he water gets sucked all the way into the ground and then suddenly shoots up nearly 100 feet into the air. Indeed, Calvert and Redbone are, at heart, very similar to the circle makers of today … real people from the margins with emotions, strengths and failings. Depraved and decadent … His prose is beautifully controlled and so graphic it’s impossible not to picture the scenes he conjures up in striking detail.
The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers | Goodreads
The notion neatly encapsulates the generosity of Myers’s magnetic novel, which brings together ingredients as diverse as folk song, Gaia theory and trauma, grounding them all in a memorable hymn to beauty. The Perfect Golden Circle makes these eccentric outsiders seem like seditionaries in arcadia, contemporary folk heroes. Away from his comfort zone, the rugged north, Myers is on fine form with the rolling wheat fields of my adopted county. Unerkannt reisen sie durchs Land, schaffen neue Kreise, die allen mysteriös erscheinen und die viele für dumme Jungenstreiche halten. Below is a map of the Golden Circle with the starting and ending points in Reykjavik (marked A and G).
In the West Country, though, history was being made at night; farmers were waking up to discover their wheat fields decorated with crop circles and other mysterious radials.
Perfect Golden Circle - Benjamin Myers - Google Books The Perfect Golden Circle - Benjamin Myers - Google Books
Myers’ short story ‘The Folk Song Singer’ was awarded the Tom-Gallon Prize in 2014 by the Society Of Authors and published by Galley Beggar Press. Redbone knows that “there exists an under-England, a chthonic place” in which there are “so many secrets that go beyond the limitations of the here and now”. This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use.He has written so many different sorts of books and The Offing was a real departure from the darkness of earlier works. It is fascinating, clever, angry, poignant, beautifully constructed but the one I shall plump for is: it is lovely. All living things are connected between seed and sod, and sod and sky, and when one component in the chain of production is altered, ailing or inefficient the entire ecosystem suffers.
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