the last book I read

In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason.

Saigon ... shit. Western Kentucky ... also a bit shit, as it happens, though in different ways. Having been in Saigon, or Vietnam in general, during the war and then ending up in Western Kentucky is probably doubly shit - Sam Hughes hasn't done that as she was born during the war but her uncle Emmett and some of his buddies have. Her father Dwayne did the Vietnam bit but sadly not the coming home bit as he was killed out there at the age of twenty-one. 

There's not a great deal to do in the small town where Emmett and Sam live - Sam does a bit of work at the local burger bar and a bit of desultory casual boning with her boyfriend Lonnie. Sam's mother, Irene, has long since headed off elsewhere in Kentucky with her new boyfriend and has recently provided Sam with a half-sister. Emmett, meanwhile, shows no particular inclination to get a job, living off what remains of his military pension and some handouts from the local veterans' association and seemingly suffering from some physical symptoms which might or might not be after-effects of exposure to Agent Orange and similar noxious stuff (or might just be acne and wind) and some non-physical symptoms which are almost certainly some form of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Sam is in her late teens now and is getting a bit more interested in what happened in Vietnam, both to Emmett and his buddies (who are a bit tight-lipped on the subject) and to Dwayne. Obviously Dwayne isn't around to tell her anything, but Irene has a small stock of letters from Dwayne, sent from Vietnam, and Dwayne's mother has an old diary, delivered back in his personal effects after his death, which she doesn't think contains anything interesting but which she admits she hasn't really read. Sam, however, devours it and finds a harrowing story of young American men dropped into the jungle, crippled by the constant raging shits, terrified at the prospect of being confronted by a mysterious enemy emerging from the jungle at any moment, long periods of boredom interspersed with occasional furious panicked activity, occasionally coming across a decomposed corpse, either friend or foe, and the gradual deadening of affect at witnessing and occasionally perpetrating all the killing.

Sam now has access to a car, albeit a fairly knackered Volkswagen Beetle, purchased from one of Emmett's old war buddies, and decides that she wants to go to the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington DC and find her Dad's name among the tens of thousands. Emmett and Dwayne's mother agree to tag along on the road trip (no small commitment as it's about 800 miles) - maybe performing this little ritual can bring Sam and maybe even Emmett some closure? Well, maybe.

I recall seeing the film of In Country as part of a late-night drunken movie marathon in what would probably have been the early- to mid-1990s; it was made in 1989 (the novel was published in 1985) during the brief period when Emily Lloyd (who plays Sam, with a pretty convincing accent, not that I could tell a Kentucky accent from a Texas one) was the next big thing acting-wise. It also stars Bruce Willis as Emmett, trying to break out from the early comedy roles and John McClane into something a bit more serious. I mean, it's OK, but I couldn't absolutely swear I stayed awake for the whole thing, and the book is much better. The film is, to be fair, better than the only other film I remember watching on the same night, which was Sleepwalkers, a film (written by Stephen King) about a small town infiltrated by a family of bizarre incestuous werecats. Not a high bar to clear, to be fair.

Anyway, it's an engaging read without doing anything very startling. The Vietnam war is of course a rich source of inspiration for artistic works (films probably more than books); books on this list that feature it (generally a bit more tangentially than In Country does) include The Human Stain, The Overstory, Fiskadoro, Bluesman, Sweet Caress and Watchmen. There's also The Quiet American, although while it's set in Vietnam strictly speaking the action there happens before the American involvement in the war kicks off. 

talking at cross purposes

A few things of note from our camping trip to Buckinghamshire last week. Firstly, yes, all right, I am forced to concede that Buckinghamshire clearly does actually exist, despite my suggestions here that it doesn't. Secondly, we stayed at Home Farm, near Radnage, about five miles north-west of High Wycombe. 

You might ask at this point: of all the marvellous places to go in this glorious country, why would you go camping in the vicinity of High Wycombe, with all due respect to the fine people who live there? Well, mainly because it is roughly equidistant between where we live and where our friends live up near Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire. Wait a minute there, you'll be saying, a straight line between South Wales and Leicestershire doesn't go through the Chilterns, you crazy mofo. Well, yes, you're right, halfway on a direct line would put us somewhere in the vicinity of Bromsgrove. But - and no disrespect intended to Bromsgrove - who wants to go on holiday in Bromsgrove? I mean, apart from those with an overriding historical interest in the nail-making industry, of course. So we pulled the line south-east a bit and ended up in the Chilterns, a place I know very slightly, mainly because I know a few people who grew up there, rather than because I've been there many times.

One of the things I do know about the Chilterns, and was reminded of on looking at some maps of the area surrounding Radnage, is that there are a few chalk hill figures in the vicinity, most notably the Whiteleaf Cross in the vicinity of Princes Risborough and the Watlington White Mark near, erm, Watlington. I know these things because I grew up in (among many other places) Newbury and went a few times to see the White Horse of Uffington, about 20 miles away to the north-west, often combined with a look at the nearby Uffington Castle hillfort and maybe even a stroll of a mile or so along the Ridgeway to Wayland's Smithy. Hang on, you'll be saying, that's away from the Chilterns, and moreover, away from, I'd venture to suggest, the point. Well, the point, if you'll allow me, is that my parents had a book called White Horses And Other Hill Figures by a chap called Morris Marples which had a very interesting chapter in it about the Uffington horse, but also many other chapters describing other horses, the vast majority of them concentrated into a fairly small area in Wiltshire. It's not just horses, either - there are a couple of giant human figures at Wilmington and Cerne Abbas, and various other things of different shapes and sizes including the figures at Whiteleaf and Watlington as mentioned above, and another which we'll come to in a minute.

Anyway, my parents seem to have lost or got rid of their copy of the Marples book - which was first published in 1949 but was still in print into the 1980s - but fortunately the internet exists and I was able to get hold of quite a handy second-hand copy from the excellent people at World of Books for a very reasonable six quid. The reason I did this, just to finally get to the point after several paragraphs of discursive waffle, is that I'd spotted the village of Bledlow very close to Radnage and had remembered that there was another cross listed in the Marples book on a nearby hill, generally known as the Bledlow Cross.

If you look at a present-day OS map of the area you'll see that the Bledlow Cross is still marked. The map on the right here is the current one; the one on the left is earlier (1960s at the latest) and has an actual cross marked in roughly the right orientation. 

I was going to go on to say: good luck finding it via Google Maps' aerial photography, though, because there's absolutely fuck all evidence of it and it's all just trees. I would have said this despite my knowledge of some clearing work having been done in the last couple of years (more on this later), having examined the aerial views before we went on holiday (I mean, I am not an idiot). Having just this minute looked again, though, I can see a clearing and a faint cross. It's not exactly clear (the green-on-green colour scheme doesn't help) but it's definitely there. I can only assume the satellite imagery has been updated at some point in the last few weeks. 

Anyway, intrigued by its apparent disappearance I put "Bledlow Cross" into YouTube to see if I could find anything and came across this rather splendid video of these two tweedy chaps going on a quest to find it. They do mention that some clearance work (presumably including felling some trees) was done as recently as February 2024 and when they eventually find the cross it is reasonably free of vegetation, though not particularly white. 

Time for a photo gallery before we get to the bit where we go on an actual quest to find it ourselves. Here's a picture from probably the first couple of decades of the 20th century showing the cross on a tree-free hillside, a photo from the Marples book which is probably from the 1940s, a photo from Mark Hows' splendid website which I would guess is maybe 1980s, a still from the video mentioned above and a drone shot resulting from the scouting expedition described here. 

So, anyway, the upshot of all this is that I persuaded all nine people in our party that we should go for a walk in the general area, including a couple of sections of the Ridgeway and the Icknield Way and a bit of geocaching, but also incorporating a quick bit of off-path scrambling about to see if we could find the cross. The couple of rope swings (one of which features in the video) were very handy here both as a navigational aid and also a distraction for those less inclined than the hardcore adventurers (me, Jim and Nia) to plough through brambles and nettles to get to what's basically a couple of medium-sized ditches. 

Anyway, the update I can give you from August 9th 2024, which is the date we visited, is that a substantial amount of regrowth has happened since the clearance work and the initial rush of YouTubers visiting to make videos. It's only grass and general weeds but it does substantially obscure the cross, and if the people involved don't want their excellent work to be in vain then a more regular programme of clearance looks like it'll be essential. Here's a few photos - Jim at the cross's lower extremity, a view looking up to the top of the cross and Nia at the cross's rough midpoint with its eastern side-arm behind her.

The map below shows the (anticlockwise) route of the walk; almost exactly six kilometres in total, although that includes some aimless thrashing about trying to find the cross and later a couple of seemingly non-existent geocaches. If you just did the walk like a sensible human being it's probably not much more than five. 

A quick footnote: the other major site of interest we visited was the Hellfire Caves in West Wycombe, which are well worth a look, and whose creator (he didn't do the actual digging, he got some plebs in to do that) Sir Francis Dashwood seems to have been a hell of a guy. We also did the walk up the hill to see his mausoleum and the church which he had a giant golden ball built on top of just so he and his mates could sit in it drinking port and chewing the fat.

We also did a bit of parkrun tourism at Wycombe Rye on Saturday and had an unexpected celebrity encounter with Vernon Kay, though we disappointingly didn't manage to sneak into any of the photographs (I think we're somewhere behind his head in the first one). We then went to the lido at the start/finish line afterwards for a dip. Swimming pools in general aren't really my thing, let alone outdoor ones on a slightly overcast day, and I haven't been in an outdoor pool in Britain since occasional visits to the one at the Northcroft Centre in Newbury as a child. That one seems to have had a substantial spruce-up and refurbishment lately; it's safe to say the Wycombe Rye one has not and could perhaps do with one. 

So, did we have a nice week? Yes we did. Am I going to prioritise a return trip for another holiday? Eh, probably not, although I am going to keep an eye on further developments with the Bledlow Cross to see if anything exciting happens. If it disappears beneath a sea of grass and bracken again then I'm going to be a bit - no, wait for it - cross. 

the last book I read

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.

Patrick Bateman has it pretty good, all things considered - lucrative job doing something mysterious in finance in New York, spiffy business cards, a nice apartment, a whole wardrobe full of designer suits and ties, a highly eligible girlfriend, at least one other woman on the side, regular dinner reservations at exclusive eateries with his group of acquaintances, all of whom do pretty much the same job as him. So he's pretty happening. He's also - and it's hard to characterise this in an acceptable way in these days of acceptance and understanding of mental health issues - properly and utterly bananas.

Let's join Patrick for a typical day, shall we? Up at dawn for a visit to the gym, then home to apply an extensive range of moisturising products and primp his fabulous hairdo, pick out one of his expensive Valentino suits, then off to the office for a day of seemingly not doing very much while getting his secretary Jean to screen his calls and cancel all his appointments. Maybe there'll be time to fit in a game of squash with a colleague, and then after work a few drinks with other colleagues, all identically clad in sharp suits, braces and glasses, then on to the latest achingly hip restaurant (via a bit of competition to see who can do the impossible job of getting a reservation) for some of the latest creations in Burmese-Ecuadorian fusion or something, and so to bed, probably with some tight little thing from the gym or a nightclub, or the waitress from the restaurant. And then, refreshed, exactly the same thing, perhaps with minor variations in restaurant choice, the following day.

There are a few clouds on the horizon of this otherwise sunny existence: everyone, including Patrick, is constantly being mistaken for someone else; in Patrick's case this is usually Marcus Halberstam, who he perceives to be beneath him by virtue of having a slightly inferior hairstyle. Conversely Patrick perceives Paul Owen to be slightly above him in the hierarchy for similar reasons (slightly better haircut, a slightly more fashionable shade of off-white on his business cards, the ability to get restaurant reservations at prohibitively trendy Dorsia) and hatches a bold and unusual plan to get back at him for this perceived slight: murder him frenziedly with an axe and then dispose of the corpse. I mean, sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.

Having done this, and emboldened by no-one seemingly giving the most tepid of fucks as to Owen's whereabouts, Patrick embarks on a spree of further murders (mostly using Owen's apartment as a venue), pretty much all of these involving women and increasingly brutal and sexual in nature. Those are the ones Patrick really takes some trouble over; others are quicker and more impulsive: stabbing a child at the zoo, shooting a homeless guy in the street, that sort of thing. That last murder attracts the attention of the police and is the catalyst for a pursuit across Manhattan (and a few more killings) which ends with Patrick taking refuge in his office building and leaving a breathless confession on his lawyer's answering machine.

The plot thickens at this point, though: not only does the lawyer not take Patrick's confession seriously (indeed he has trouble recognising who Patrick is), he says that Owen can't be dead because he had dinner with him only a few nights ago. Moreover, when Patrick re-visits Owen's apartment, expecting to find it festooned with entrails and with severed heads in the fridge, he instead finds it clean and with a real estate agent showing prospective tenants around.

So what's going on? Clearly Patrick is a massively unreliable narrator, but are we to assume that the murders never happened? Has the whole thing been a fantasy? Well, those reading the book will have to make up their own minds as it's left slightly ambiguous, but you do have to wonder about the noise and the smell, not to mention the logistics of disposing of several corpses without being rumbled. Then again it wouldn't be the first time this sort of thing had gone apparently unnoticed by the neighbours.

Whatever the reader might conclude about the likelihood of the murders described having actually happened, they will almost certainly have some idea of what point the book is trying to make. Clearly there's some black satire on consumerism, 1980s greed, the emptiness of Patrick and his cronies' day-to-day activities, the implicit sexism and racism involved in it. There are lots of very funny sections - the early chapters where Patrick describes in excruciating detail the designer clothes he and his dinner companions are wearing, the braying banality of Harvard and Yale types hailing each other by their surnames across a crowded restaurant, Patrick's gradual mental disintegration throughout the course of the book - but there's no getting away from the brutality and graphicness of the descriptions of the murders of the several women that Patrick dispatches. It was this stuff that got the book into trouble when it was originally published in 1991 and it remains (slightly bizarrely) banned in the Australian state of Queensland. 

To be honest, as open as I am to experimental and transgressive fiction, I did find the extensive descriptions of torture and murder of women a bit hard to stomach. I suppose this is part of the point of the book, though: some of whose themes are (or seem to me to be) to do with what JG Ballard called "the death of affect", i.e. the flattening out of emotion in response to an increasingly overwhelming rush of stimuli, and a corresponding need for more and more extreme input in order to provoke feeling.

I can't say I absolutely loved American Psycho, but it works pretty effectively as an extreme blackly comic satire of its targets. I was already familiar with its 2000 movie adaptation (though I don't think I've ever seen the whole thing), which is mainly notable for a remarkable and career-reviving central performance from Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman. Obviously the film does tone down some of the old ultraviolence a bit, though it's still pretty graphic, and is more explicitly comic than the book. It also features Jared Leto playing much the same part as he does in Fight Club, i.e. a pretty rival and target of resentment whose main plot role is to be ritually brutalised (to death, in this case) by the protagonist. American Psycho is the third novel on this list to be adapted into a film starring Christian Bale, the other two being Empire Of The Sun and Metroland.