The Perfect Golden Circle (Compact Disc)

Staff Reviews

Fuel the myth and strive for beauty.

I was completely drawn in by this oddly charming tale of friendship and environmental guerrilla art, a quiet, peculiar, and utterly likable novel about crop circles that serves as a memorable hymn to beauty and artistic transcendence. The year is 1989, the place rural England, and the story centering on the creators of these surreptitiously created crop circles, the quintessential outsider odd couple Redbone and Calvert---Redbone, a crusty punk-hippie who dreams up increasingly complex geometric patterns, and Calvert, a traumatized veteran of the Falklands War who scouts field locations. They aim to create something worthy of a folk myth, something that will “baffle, beguile, provoke and amaze, something bigger than the mundane details of our tiny lives.” The Perfect Golden Circle is poignant, beautifully constructed, and leisurely paced, a nuanced tale that rewards the reader who slows to its rhythms and intense lyricism. There is a loveliness to the storytelling here that had me re-reading sentences for the joy of it. It is moving meditation on the urge to create, on personal loneliness, on healing and finding purpose, and along the way has subtle things to say about warfare, climate calamity, trauma, sobriety, landscape, and ecological destruction. One of my favorite novels of the year!! Ed loved and highly recommends!