The Perfect Golden Circle: Selected for BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club 2022

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What appears a simple tale of the two men striving for perfection, turns out to be far more complex. You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side.

Told in gorgeous prose that brings the blistering, dusty summer heat and richly memorable characters to life, The Perfect Golden Circle was a perfect escape from the rainy Dutch fall days.

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Thanks for your question. I think that 6 hours is just barely enough time to visit all 5 spots in the guide. If you break it down – the driving time alone (starting and ending in Reykjavik) is going to be in the 3.5 hour range. That would leave you with around 2.5 hours for the 5 attractions plus a stop for lunch as well. If you are fine with just seeing each place for 30 minutes and moving on to the next then that can be done in 6 hours. However if you want more time to explore each place and not be rushed, somewhere closer to 7-8 hours would be best. Der perfekte Kreis“ von Benjamin Myers ist ein ganz ganz leises Buch, das sich mühelos in mein Herz verpflanzt hat. Wieder einmal schafft Benjamin Myers hier Zeilen, in denen ich einfach so viel finden konnte und mit denen er all meine Sinne berührt hat! Pretty good, though the characters felt a bit flat to me and I would have liked the structure to be a bit more diverse.

Bathed in moonlight, Myers’s land thrums with more ancient reverberations, too. There is, he writes, “an under-England, a chthonic place of hidden rivers and buried relics, of the bones of extinct animals and battle-slain bodies”. His main characters are acutely aware of it – their industry, it’s hinted, flows from it – and the humbling sense of perspective this confers is balm and inspiration. A second option is snorkeling or diving between the continental tectonic plates – a very unique opportunity and one that not everyone can say they have done.Some highlights will include hiking along tectonic plates, seeing an 100 foot geyser shoot out the ground, and potentially getting up close and personal to a bright blue waterfall and river. It’s a quiet, odd kind of story. Their relationship is very endearing. Neither militant or full-on hippies, but more concerned with what the book feels to be attempting to convey: Anyone with a radical idea can add another layer of mythos to culture. In this case in a very literal sense, as they use the land in a harmless way to produce art that hopefully entices people to question the nature of their society, and what they think they know about the world. Hoping to unconventionally and originally revolutionary, leaving an indelible mark. Benjamin Myers hat mich mit seinem Roman „Offene See“ bereits so begeistern können, dass ich erfreut war, zu sehen, dass es mit „Der perfekte Kreis“ (Dumont-Verlag, Übersetzung: Ulrike Wasel und Klaus Timmermann, die bereits bei „Offene See“ großartige Arbeit geleistet haben!) ein neues Buch von ihm gibt.

The fields are rarely quiet at night. Redbone and Calvert encounter “lampers”, driving around in open-top jeeps shining spotlights at badgers and hares before setting dogs on them. They come across people having sex in laybys; fly-tippers; Gypsy prizefighters; a ghostly old woman who says she has been searching for her missing dog, Sebastian, most nights since 1909; a pissed aristocrat who turns out to be the son of the third richest landowner in the country.You can stay around for just one spout or stay around for several until you get the perfect shot and slow motion video. In parts the story has laugh out loud lines and in others my heart was in my mouth for fear of them being caught or vandalism ruining the perfection. It is heartwarming and heartbreaking.

Of course, I was a child at that time and I know very well, drop circles. We know that these two people constructing what was often said to be impossible, did leave a mark. But it’s also fiction, of course. But an interesting thought in relation to what crop circles beg to ask of the viewer. There’s some fun meta context reading this now, and I’m sure in the future.

Reviews

There are aspects of The Perfect Golden Circle that flow through many of his novels - poetic prose, beautiful descriptions of the landscape, subtle social commentary. Under cover of darkness, they traverse the fields of rural England in secret, forming crop circles in elaborate and mysterious patterns, painstakingly avoiding damaging the wheat to yield designs so intricate that their overnight appearances inspire awe amongst a mystified public.