“Without fields – no us. Without us – no fields,” wrote the great nature writer Tim Dee in his 2013 book Four Fields. He had a caveat: “These acres of shaped growing earth, telling our shared story over and over, are so ordinary, ubiquitous and banal that we have – mostly – stopped noticing them as anything other than substrate or backdrop, the green crayon-lane across the bottom of every child’s drawing.”
It’s this myopia that Benjamin Myers explores in his roiling, rollicking novel The Perfect Golden Circle, set during the long hot summer of 1989. Thatcher, apartheid, the Berlin Wall: things seemed solid then. 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. Was it the work of extraterrestrials, or proto Banksys?
