AS IT LIES SERIES

Dr. Alister MacKenzie was a Yorkshire physician with Highland blood, a Boer War surgeon who came home fascinated by the wrong thing. While the Army studied Boer marksmanship, he studied Boer concealment — earthworks so faithful to the surrounding country that artillery could not find them. In the trenches of France he made a career of it, teaching the British Army to hide what it built. And somewhere between the mud and the drawing board he understood that the discipline had a second use: a golf hole, like a gun emplacement, should look as though no one put it there at all.

As It Lies traces the thirty years that idea took to become Augusta National. It moves between the Leeds parlor where Edith balances the household ledgers in flawless copperplate and informs him that no one needs golf courses; the fog-soaked fairways of Pasatiempo where a caddy named Louie learns to read ground he will never be permitted to play; the Monterey cypress at Cypress Point; and a shuttered Georgia nursery where Bobby Jones — the only golfer MacKenzie ever envied — has an idea he cannot draw, and Clifford Roberts has a chequebook he intends to keep closed.

The story is told largely through witnesses, because that is the shape of the man’s life: an architect whose signature is invisible by design. Louie sees him at his most unguarded and least explicable, a stooped figure in a holed tweed jacket and a plaid kilt arguing with a hillside. Hilda sees the cost of the arguing. Roberts sees an invoice. Jones sees, briefly and completely, exactly what MacKenzie sees — and that recognition is the closest thing to friendship the book allows either of them.

It ends where it must. A telegram. A last sketch. A bedroom smelling of camphor above a fairway in January, and a man writing poor house in his own hand in a letter that gets no reply inside the year. Then a spring afternoon two years on, a boy in a clearing with a soft-cornered notebook, and four hundred people making a single noise because the ground asked them to.