Benjamin Myers' THE PERFECT GOLDEN CIRCLE

He knows there is something else under all this. He knows there exists an under-England, a chthonic place of hidden rivers and buried relics, of the bones of extinct animals and battle-slain bodies. Layer upon layer of it, laminations of land, each made from stories packed tightly by the weight of time so that they become something else, just as wood becomes charcoal. So many stories, so many unseen footsteps. So many secrets that go beyond the limitations of the here and now.

I have a well- documented history of loving things like crop circles and of loving the people who love them. One of my favorite people ever to live was an aficionado; it's over this shared love that we first became friends. I still miss Mac Tonnies, all the time. 

I wish he was still around to have enjoyed The Perfect Golden Circle, Benjamin Myers' delightful character study of English eccentricity and the single- minded pursuit of a certain very unusual art form. 

 The Perfect Golden Circle is a delightful piece of conventional prose fiction, structured entirely around the serial creation by two men of vast crop circles of increasing scope and intricacy, intercut with snippets, John Dos Passos-style, of public reactions to same, mostly via the press. 

One way in which this novel, which takes two real "land artists" from the 1970s and 80s as inspiration but in no way tells their actual stories, really stands out is in its treatment of male friendship as something that can just be, without elaborate shared backstories or pseudo-psychoanalysis or invented conflicts or petty rivalries or toxicity of any kind. While they are very different men with no real reason to even know each other, let alone spend hours in the pub planning and more in the farm fields of England in the dead of night executing their plans, they do all of that, always together. Falklands War veteran Calvert and crustpunk Redbone don't even have a meet cute in the text of the story; we meet them in the third year of their project, the year they've decided to go beyond having a strange shared hobby and turn it into, as Redbone describes it at one point, a pursuit of art, myth and mystery. 

But the book's primary delight is describing the near-miss adventures the pair experience over the course of their summer as various other denizens of the British countryside at night, from rabbit-hunting weasels (in more than one sense) to tipsy toff landowners to the ever-increasing number of crop circle fanciers, armed with crackpot theories, homemade detective gear and flashlights, who are hoping to catch the aliens/fairies/secret agents/whatever in flagrante.

This was an especially enjoyable read for me on the heels of Andy Sharp's English Heretic, similarly concerned with English geography but altogether different in how the landscape might be interpreted. Here the land is scrutinized by Calvert's experienced logistical eye as he seeks the right field for the right project, which must not only be big and flat and full of ripening cereal crops but must also be accessible to two guys in an ancient VW van, and near a feature, natural or man-made, of sufficient height and, again, accessibility from which to view their creations in all their bizarre glory. 

It's better still if they have an interesting local name which can be incorporated into their private nomenclature. The best of these is the Cuckoo Spittle Thought Bubble, with the first two words coming from the name of the elevated landmark and the latter two describing the design they pressed, step by step with planks and ropes, into the grasses -- carefully and respectfully so as not to break the grain stalks and ruin the harvest. 

Ruining the harvest comes later, when the press blows up the sensation and people start flocking from as far away as exotic Oklahoma and Wyoming (heh) to see and study Calvert and Redbone's work, camping and trampling and dumping and landing helicopters. At least the more enterprising farmers can make up their losses by charging admission to see their new wonder.

Another source of great charm in The Perfect Golden Circle is the pair's consistent enjoyment of the attention given their work and the wild speculations about it. They take particular pleasure in seeing how close the press comes, in naming their productions on television or on the front pages of daily, sometimes national or international newspapers, to giving them the same names Calvert and Redbone did themselves. 

I'm reliably told by a friend on one of my book-focused Discord servers that Benjamin Myers is a reliable source for very, very good and beautiful books, but that no two of his are very much alike. Based on this one, I'll be exploring more of his work soon -- but not too soon, because I don't know if you've really noticed, but I'm on a year of trying to read only one book by any one author, and I'm doing my best to stick to that, but it's hard when I keep getting invited on buddy reads and book club forays. So I might cave and get, say The Gallows Pole or something sooner. Who knows?