The Perfect Golden Circle
BENJAMIN MYERS
(BLOOMSBURY CIRCUS, 256 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • tel 020 7799 4064

If the sky spoke to us, would we listen? Towards the end of The Perfect Golden Circle, Benjamin Myers describes the primeval anxieties of farmers watching clouds roil above their heads, eyes itching for signs of catastrophe – or salvation. Inserted into a robustly anti-pastoral narrative – set in an un-Arcadian 1989 – the persistence of such worries is a cause of pessimism, not comfort. Encountering the natural world, we’re still caught, as the farmers are, between ignorance and understanding. We can piece together signs and symbols, parse movements of wood and wind, make sensible guesses. But we share a world with nature, not a language.