Circular arguments

As an author, it must be galling to find yourself wilfully misread.

Benjamin Myers' new novel The Perfect Golden Circle, published today, centres on the phenomenon of crop circles, which were particularly prevalent in the late 1980s. In a recent article for the Guardian, he argued for their significance as anti-capitalist artworks that used the countryside as canvas and were created anonymously and "impossible to either move or monetise".

Myers suggests that not only did they have aesthetic value, constituting "an important chapter in the evolution of indigenous British folk art", but that they were made with subversive intent, connected to both the protests over land ownership of the past and the contemporary "rural unrest" associated with New Age Travellers and the so-called second Summer of Love. (Jeremy Deller's Everybody In The Place is useful background viewing, for anyone interested.)

All of this feeds into the novel - and yet Spectator reviewer Maggie Orford begins her myopic, sneering review by claiming that it's "ostensibly about male friendship", before going on to ignore the political context entirely. While it's not exactly surprising that the Spectator should shy away from any engagement with the novel's message, there's an irony (given the subject matter) in the fact that Orford completely misses the bigger picture - as there is in her complaint about a "lacuna at the heart of the book". Pot, kettle, black, etc.

It's not clear whether the photo that accompanies the review - a stock image of a black sun symbol, associated with Nazis - is an embarrassing self-own or an sly attempt to smear Myers and undermine his argument. Either way, he's been moved to distance himself from it. And, no doubt, curse the fact that the Spectator saw fit to "review" The Perfect Golden Circle in the first place.