Timber epic a riveting read

Serena, Ron Rash, Text Publishing, $39

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THE POET, short story writer and novelist Ron Rash was born in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, beneath the shadow of MtMitchell in the forested Southern Appalachian ranges.

Presently the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University, he states in his biography that his ancestors have laid claim to that wild territory since the mid-1700s.

Only an author possessing intimate knowledge of this brutal, majestic, incestuous and mysterious landscape could write Serena, a stunning, gothic tale of lust, greed and violence set against the turbulent beauty of those unforgiving highlands.

Often-times, the landscape seems the dominant character in this saga of reprisal and revenge, as it takes the lives of those who reap its assets without gratitude or return.

Set in the early 1930s at the tail end of the Great Depression and at the start of the environmental movement championed by John Muir, father of America's great National Park System, the protagonists of Serena are timber, coal and mining barons eager to raze the wilderness in advance of the journalists and naturalists keen to preserve the landscape for future generations.

The tension between the forces of industry and those of preservation create the rhythmic drumbeat upon which the melody of this novel is set. While the dark carnage emboldened by Serena seems the likely heir to James Dickey's epic Deliverance, it also seems the contemporary of Sinclair Lewis's novelistic exposes Oil! and Babbit. Though classical in form, Serena has a complex, modern female protagonist who is feral, cruel, overtly sexual and staggeringly fearless. As she wins over the skeptical logging camp with her supreme hunting skills and timber knowledge, she rides a white Arabian with an eagle trained to kill deadly rattlesnakes resting on her forearm.

A Southern Gothic incarnation of Lady Macbeth, Serena has a disturbing mythic opulence which gives this saga in five acts its tragic Shakespearean resonance.

The novel begins in classically portentous fashion. The handsome young Pemberton has returned to Waynesville, the site of his North Carolina timber plantations, with his young wife, Serena, whom he has met at a Boston soiree while settling his father's estate. Though warned of her guileless charms, Pemberton is instantly captivated by her fearless aggression as she seeks him out and seduces him.

The orphaned daughter of Colorado timber barons, Serena is her family's sole survivor of the great influenza epidemic, but her father has taught her the intricacies of timber lore, and she has been seeking her true match, which she believes she has found in Pemberton.

Their love and ambition soon entwine, knowing no bounds. They marry and Pemberton brings her home to Waynesville, where his business partners, the elegant Buchanan and the gruff Harris, meet them at the railroad depot.

Also at the train station is Harmon, a local logger who is waiting with his daughter who worked as a server in Pemberton's household and is now pregnant with Pemberton's child. Upon disembarking, Harmon confronts Pemberton, demanding that he do what is right for his daughter, slashing Pemberton with his Bowie knife. Pemberton then literally eviscerates his enemy to the delight of his new bride who believes that her beloved has set a good example for other rebellious workers.

Rash's exquisitely written novel reads like a classical thriller with masterful poetic overtones. While the fate of these characters seems inevitable, the startling evocation of their blood lust is nonetheless shocking. The novel is didactic in the best sense of the word as it painstakingly evokes the ferocious razing of the great Appalachian forests where men are impaled on falling tree branches and axes accidentally sear limb from limb.

Rash consciously employs the lumberjacks as a Greek chorus, and even includes a nearly blind oracle to comment on the play as Pemberton's hubris falls prey to the grandiose ambition of his heartless wife whose will attains everything but what it most desires. This novel will set your heart beating and keep you riveted to its final coda. For me, it was a thrilling and wondrous surprise.

Cheryl Sucher is a reviewer based in Hawke's Bay.

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