Ron Rash's Serena

Back in August, I was fortunate enough to sit in on a panel at the Decatur Books Festival. The discussion, entitled “Down from the Mountain,” featured two authors from the Appalachian region. I was certainly already familiar with Lee Smith as an author I adore, but Ron Rash was new to me. During the panel, he read from his newest work Serena, which had not been published at that time, and I was anxious to read it after his reading and explanation. The novel did not disappoint.

In short, it’s an Appalachian retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It does not follow the story precisely; Rash is far more creative than that. It does, however, hinge on the theme of blind ambition, and the story centers around a female character you love and hate at the same time, one who steers the ship for her husband as they encounter obstacles on the way to their success. It is this character, Serena Pemberton, who keeps you turning the pages and makes the novel worthy of its hype.

Originally from the mountains of Colorado, Serena meets her husband in Boston before the two of them establish a lumber empire in the North Carolina mountains. Life in the lumber business is hard, and the workers in the lumber camp often lose limbs and lives in their day-to-day work. It’s clearly no place for a woman, but Serena has no difficulty holding her own here, and furthermore, she manages to present herself as a superior when the workers quickly understand that she, even more so than her husband, is the one to answer to and the one to fear.

With a white horse and a trained eagle on her side, Serena’s character is unmistakably mythic in her capabilities and in Ron Rash’s description of her. Rash describes her training the eagle; “Each dawn the following weeks, Serena walked into the stable’s back stall and freed the eagle from the block perch. She and the bird spent the morning alone in tree-shorn plain below Half Acre Ridge…..By the fifth day the bird perched in Serena’s right forearm, its head black-hooded like an executioner, the five-foot leash tied to Serena’s right elbow and the leather bracelets around the raptor’s feet” (102). The image of Serena dashing across the mountain on her white horse with the eagle perched alongside her is one that makes quite an impression on the lumber workers and on the reader.

A story of a vast lumber empire is not what drives the plot of the novel, however. Soon after setting foot off the train from Boston, Serena learns firsthand that her husband’s previous relationship has produced a son in these mountains, and like Lady Macbeth, that seems to be the one thing she cannot give her groom. Many twists and turns ensue from there, and the ending of this novel is one of the most memorable conclusions I have ever read.

All in all, Ron Rash reveals a story of violence and misery but also one of love and devotion, and Serena Pemberton is a character who will stay with you long after the novel is finished. It's certainly one of my best reads of the year.