Book #15 for 2024: The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers
The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was a book that was recommended by BBC's "Between the Covers". It is all about the well-known phenomena known as "crop circles", widely believed to be the work of extra-terrestrials. This book asks the question: "What if it was just humans doing it all?"
In this book set in 1989, the two main characters spend the whole book making crop circles, and other designs in fields of crops, so every chapter is a different mini-story about them creating a new design. A lot of the episodes involve slightly bizarre encounters with other people: An outing on the solstice day leads them to meet naked wiccans, another evening they meet an old lady with dementia who is looking for her dog. At the end of each chapter there is usually a newspaper report, presumably written by the author, about the reactions to what the two characters are doing.
I wasn't really sure what to make of this novel; sure, the prose was really good, despite the insistence on writing it almost entirely in the present tense, but I didn't really think there was much of a story. Basically, it was just people creating crop circles, and nothing else, no character development, and I thought the same of them as I got to the end, as I did when I started. Sure, it seems to be a book that's more about immersing the reader in the locations that it describes, but I was hoping for something with more plot.
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