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

Product Information

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. The Perfect Golden Circle is the perfect short story. That's precisely how it landed with me—a captured moment in time, an excerpt from a much longer narrative of these central characters, how they came together, what would happen to as their lives rolled along... and yet it is a novel, if only because its length shelves it as such. DNF'd @ 26% - Argh! I'm getting a bit angry lately, but I'm unsure if it's the books I'm angry with, or myself. It seems I've abandoned several books lately. I don't like doing that, but neither do I like to waste time with a book I'm not enjoying! So here I go again.😕

Though nature and the environment is a common theme to all Myers's work, there is more new ground embarked upon here than is retrodden. Humour has more of a place, though its foundations are deeply serious. Der Roman kommt ohne starken Spannungsbogen daher. Es geht eher um die Freundschaft der beiden Protagonisten, ihre Erlebnisse und Traumata und sehr gelungene Naturbeschreibungen der Natur und Landschaft Englands. Der Erzählton ist ruhig und gemütlich, hat Tiefgang und tolle sprachliche Bilder. Trotzdem konnte mich diese Geschichte nicht genauso begeistern wie "offene See". Redbone und Calvert kamen mir nicht nah genug und auch fehlte mir ein gewisser Spannungsbogen. Dieser Roman ist eine ruhig erzählte, von Bildern der Natur Englands geprägte Geschichte mit zwei vom Leben gebeutelten Protagonisten und poetischem, atmosphärischem Schreibstil. By going through Rentalcars.com, you will have the chance to compare car prices among a variety of rental companies, and choose the best option for you.Myers' works can be classified as many things; historical fiction, nature writing, literary fiction, contemporary whilst also being challenging, raw, poetic and emotionally led. His new offering 'The Perfect Golden Circle' shows a culmination in all of these areas and Myers delivers a story that has a huge heart beating at the very centre of this particular golden circle. Turning Blue (2016) was described as a "folk crime" novel, and praised by writers including Val McDermid. A sequel These Darkening Days followed in 2017. Die Menschen wollen einfach an etwas Größeres als das hier glauben. Etwas Jenseitiges. Das lenkt sie von dem banalen Alltag ihres kleinen Lebens ab. Kann man verstehen.“ (S. 79) Wir haben kolonisiert und geplündert, und dann, wenn wir unschuldige Menschen abgeschlachtet und ihrer Schätze beraubt hatten, sind wir mit Reichtümern heimgekehrt. […] Das Meer ist eine Grenze, eine Begrenzung, und da wir auf einer Insel leben, bilden wir uns ein, wir wären etwas Besonderes. Aber das sind wir nicht. Wir haben bloß Angst, mehr nicht. Wir haben Angst vor der Welt. Und das erzeugt Arroganz und Ignoranz, und Ignoranz ist der Tod des Anstands.“ (S. 67) Ich kam nicht mit den Protagonisten zurecht, der Sinn hinter allem erschloss sich mir auch nicht und die leisen Töne, die ich sonst so liebe, waren selbst mir zu fad.

Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?Two counter-culture friends, bonded together through their art and quirks of personality, undergo an ambitious project of crop circles in ‘89, near London, attempting to outdo anything before constructed. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. England, 1989. Over the course of a burning hot summer, two very different men – traumatized Falklands veteran Calvert, and affable, chaotic Redbone – set out nightly in a clapped-out camper van to undertake an extraordinary project. Even with that said, do not expect there to be thousands of people at each one of these spots. Just note it could be a bit more crowded than other places further away from the capital city. 2) How to Get Around the Golden Circle Den perfekten Kreis. Den könnten wir niemals hinbekommen. Er existiert nicht. Ehrlich gesagt, ich glaube, nichts was von Menschen gemacht wird, kann je perfekt sein.“ (S. 107)

Starting in Reykjavik, the round trip should take approximately 7-8 hours: 3.5 hours of driving time + however long you decide to stay at each of the attractions listed below. 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. Myers has produced another great novel here to go with The Offing and Cuddy, already two of my favourites of all time. This was is set in the summer of 1989 in rural Wiltshire and centred around crop circles. It was the time of illegal raves and New Age Travellers and the Thatcher era was beginning to wind down with protests about the poll tax. As Redbone rightly tells us, there is no perfect circle but Dum spiro spero (While I breath I hope), so we continue striving, breathing, hoping, eventhough PTSD is crippling us or the world buffets as along from one gig to another. Myers ode to a great gentle friendship and the huge satisfaction of creating beauty and being in harmony with the natural world around us.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. Summer 1989, rural England, the tail end of long decade of mass unemployment, class war and rebellion, and the continued destruction of the English countryside. Redbone und Calvert sind zwei Freunde, wie sie unterschiedlicher nicht sein können. Aber das ist ja – zumeist – eine gute Basis für eine Freundschaft. Denn bei allen Unterschieden gibt es natürlich auch Gemeinsamkeiten; so ihre Liebe zur Natur, zur Freiheit – und zur Erschaffung von Kornkreisen. Sie wollen den „perfekten Kreis“ gestalten, obwohl Myers seinen Protagonisten Redbone sagen lässt: In Myers’s telling, the men responsible were no vandals. Redbone and Calvert are an odd couple; their names may suggest a Savile Row shirtmaker, but the pair are closer in spirit to centrifugal visionaries such as the KLF. Redbone is younger, has travelled Europe with various bands, and is popular with women; Calvert is taciturn, always wears sunglasses, and has PTSD after serving in the SAS during the Falklands war. For weeks on end, living in a battered camper van, they move through the English countryside. Their goals: to create ever more dazzling patterns, to stay anonymous, to not get caught.

Moving and exhilarating, tender and slyly witty, The Perfect Golden Circle is a captivating novel about the futility of war, the destruction of the English countryside, class inequality – and the power of beauty to heal trauma and fight power. REZENSION - „Solange ich atme, hoffe ich“. Dieses Mantra einer der beiden Hauptfiguren im neuen Roman „Der perfekte Kreis“ des britischen Schriftstellers Benjamin Myers (45), erschienen im September beim Dumont Verlag, zeigt in wenigen Worten, dass trotz aller Mühen unser Wirken auf Erden unvollkommen ist. Vollkommenheit bleibt eine unerfüllte und wohl unerfüllbare Hoffnung. Auf diesen Widerspruch zwischen Hoffnung und Wirklichkeit verweist auch der Titel dieser wunderbaren Novelle, kann es doch den perfekten Kreis nicht geben, wie schon das Cover mit der Abbildung des Ensō-Symbols aus der japanischen Kalligraphie deutlich macht. Nur ein vollkommener Mensch könne demnach ein wahres Ensō zeichnen, während die Öffnung Unvollkommenheit symbolisiert. And what of the crop circles? For Calvert and Redbone, it is their true purpose. The circles themselves part of something more, something hopeful within a warring and dying world. Dee argued that fields show “how we live both within the grain of the world and against it”. Those trespassed by Redbone and Calvert serve to hex that persistent strain of English pastoralism that dotes on baronial piles and manicured landscapes. They embody a counter-tradition: the pagan, anarchistic ruralism so vividly channelled in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, or David Rudkin’s Penda’s Fen, or by rogue art groups such as English Heretic and Folklore Tapes. The novel begins portentously. The narrative invokes wolves stalking shrinking copses and fields that are full of bones, “rotting deep in the rich soil of a singular cemetery called England”. Throughout, there are echoes of David Peace, Gordon Burn, Stephen Barber – writers who render the recent past as occulture, hallucinatory. There are also spectres of other more politically fraught fields from the 80s: Goose Green, Orgreave, the Battle of the Beanfield near Stonehenge.The notion neatly encapsulates the generosity of Myers’s magnetic novel, which brings together ingredients as diverse as folk song, Gaia theory and trauma, grounding them all in a memorable hymn to beauty.