Serena by Ron Rash

A little off the beaten path from the typical MRB fare.

George Pemberton runs a timber operation in depression-era western North Carolina. He brings his bride down from Boston, but Serena is no blue-blood. Her father taught her the ways of woods in Colorado before the flu epidemic took her entire family. She turned her back on her past, ordered the homestead burned to the ground and headed east.

Prior to meeting Serena, George had kept the company of Rachel, a kitchen worker, and impregnated her just before the fateful trip to Boston and the beginnings of a whirlwind romance and wedding to Serena. Rachel's daddy ain't happy and challenges George as the new power couple alights from the train. George gets the best of Rachel's father right there on the platform after which Serena tells Rachel how sorry she is and that Rachel had better not expect any support from George for her bastard child.

Serena turns out to be the equal to most any man in the timber camp from notching to riding to sawing to laying rails to training an eagle to kill rattlesnakes and is way ahead of everyone in the high country when it comes to deceit. She is fiercely loyal to George and his company and engenders further loyalty from Galloway, a worker whose life she saves after a axe accident. In Galloway's chivalrous mind, he is indebted to Serena forever, to do whatever she wishes or sees necessary to be done.

This takes place during the birthplace of the US National Park movement and the Feds are buying up land to develop what would become the Smokey Mountain National Park. As noble as the gesture sounds, timber and jobs and profit are foremost on the Pemberton's mind. Serena wants to delay the process long enough for them to clear cut thousands of acres of land and use their profits to buy hundreds of thousands of prime Brazilian forest where there is enough virgin mahogany to keep them rich for life.

Of course, problems arise. Serena's pregnancy end in miscarriage, told she will never be able to bear children. Other landowners are caving in to the Feds, workers are dying on a regular basis, and then the widow woman who cares for Rachel's baby when Rachel heads back to work is found murdered, George fears for Rachel and young Jacob's life . . .

A story of pure ambition on the part of both Pembertons with equal parts of jealousy, greed, and envy stirred in. Neither is beyond doing anything necessary to twist events in their favor until one last event leads to the most relentless act of all.

Sounds mildly Shakespearian, yes? While I know little of the plots of most of the Bard's work, this one sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it. Upon reading a review of this 2008 New York Times bestseller, it hit me - MacBeth. A retelling of MacBeth set in late 1920's-1930's timber industry of western North Carolina. I might've enjoyed Shakespeare in high school if it was presented like this. Eloquently written by one who obviously loves language.

I was pointed toward the author when reading a review of "a land more kind than home" that said Wiley Cash's first book could stand alongside of other notable books of rural North Carolina and mentioned Rash's name. Living in NC, that meant I needed to check Rash out. A poet and novelist of some note, Rash is on the faculty of Western North Carolina University and most articles about him said that Serena presented the grandest scale and sweep of the time and location. Literature on a broad scale. And I just saw today, it is being filmed (or has just concluded principle filming) with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper in the lead - good casting if you ask me. look for it in 2013.