Serena: A Novel
by Ron Rash
|
List Price: Our Price: $6.41 You Save: $18.58 (74%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.72 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Serena: A Novel
Book Review: Deep, dark historical thriller
Summary: 5 Stars
Serena is a deep, dark historical thriller which pulled me in from its first foreboding paragraph and never let me out of its fierce grip until the haunting power of its bold denouement finally wrenched and released me.
It is a taut and chilling reading experience which plumbs the depths of ambition, greed, wealth, ruthlessness and lust for power. Set in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina during the Great Depression of 1929, Ron Rash explores a grim and brutal era of American history fearlessly and engagingly. With prose as poetic as it is precise, his words render into moods and landscapes that are arresting and evocative.
The story is centered on a land battle between the powerful timber company of Serena and George Pemberton, who are logging and ravaging the land, and government conservationists and environmentalists, who are working to protect the land and its resources by establishing the Great Smokies National Park. Serena in this sense is an American classic which speaks profoundly of a land and its people, of a society and its moral fabric. Rush recreates dialects and characters, landscape and seasons, action and drama which are authentic, relevant and demanding of attention.
In his title character Serena, Rash recreates a Lady Macbeth ~ a beautiful, brilliant, conniving woman of commanding strength. Serena is a megalomaniac who will stop at nothing, even murder, to vanguish anyone who gets in her way. She is obssessive to the point of madness. She is more male in persona than female and even stronger and bolder in character than her husband, George. Like Lady Macbeth she seduces, she challenges, she goads her husband to carry out her wishes, even if it means cold-blooded murder. She is a woman of lust, not love; of selfishness, not compassion. There is a scene when Serena suffers a miscarriage and George must give her a blood transfusion. Serena shows no grief at having lost her child, rather ~ "Your blood merged with mine," Serena said. "That's all we ever hoped for anyway." ~ suggesting that with the co-mingling of their blood, George must take on her persona with her and be one with her. The results are tragic and shocking.
Serena is a gorgeously written novel, rich in atmosphere and life's substance. It speaks to society now as much as of the society of then and is a reading experience that will not be forgotten. I give my highest recommendation.
Book Review: Brilliant Portrayal of Evil and Destruction in the Backdrop of the Smoky Mountains
Summary: 5 Stars
This novel opens with a bang. Pemberton brings his new wife, Serena, home to Appalachia and his logging camp. Waiting for him as the train stops is the father of the young woman who is pregnant with Pemberton's child. The girl's father plans to kill Pemberton as his pregnant daughter watches. Things turn out differently, however. Pemberton, with the blessing of his wife Serena, duels with the father and kills him. Serena gives the daughter the knife from her father's body and tells her that she will never get any help from them for her child.
The book progresses as the couple builds a logging empire, razing the land all around them to stumps and polluting the environment. This is told in the back-drop of the Great Depression and FDR's starting up of National Parks. Naturally, the Pembertons are opposed to parks and they buy up all the land they can to log while buying off all the people they can to turn the outcomes in their favor. Those in their way, they kill or have killed. There is no compassion forthcoming from these two.
Many others die due to the horrible conditions in the logging camp. As soon as someone is injured they are fired and replaced. If they die, the next person waiting for a job gets hired. There is no compensation and certainly no compassion. Everyone is expendable to the Pembertons.
Even in love there is a visage of portending evil. Serena wants Pemberton to be satisfied in life with only her - the two of them together against the world. She describes their lovemaking as 'annihilation'. This is symbolic of the two of them needing only one another and the rest of the world being expendable if they do not fit into Serena and Pembertan's plans. Unfortunately, Serena can not produce an heir and she begins to worry whether Pemberton is secretly helping his illegitimate son and his mother.
Serena goes around on her white Arabian horse with an Eagle trained to kill rattlesnakes and other enemies. As she begins to suspect that Pemberton might have some interests that are not solely her, the balance of love and power begin to shift.
I found this a powerful book, beautifully written with wonderfully developed characterization. The sense of time and place is superb. I highly recommend this book.
Book Review: Derivative, terribly-written trash
Summary: 1 Stars
This is the first of Ron Rash's work I've ever read. Friends whose opinions I respect tell me they have enjoyed his short fiction. I find it difficult to imagine. I read it only because my book club assigned it, and by the third time he falls back on "couple" as his favorite synonym for "have sex," I was counting the pages I still had left to read. I just now got to the end (page 367), hurled the novel across the room, and sighed about the hours of my life I'll never get back. Two main objections to the book bubble to the surface of the seething stew of anger in my brain.
I have rarely read a published work that engaged my proofreading brain this much, first of all. The novel contains spelling errors, misplaced commas, and subject-verb disagreements. I would assume that the many, many sentence fragments were just ill-advised rhetorical flourishes if it weren't for the number of times I had to read and reread a sentence before realizing that it was simply badly written. Rash is just not a very good writer, technically. He thanks his editor in the acknowledgments, but such thanks are misplaced.
Secondly, the characterization is laughably cartoonish. Rash, who has loosely based his title character on a somewhat more successful Lady Macbeth, attempts to evoke the larger-than-life register of Shakespearean tragedy, with risible results. The occasional snatches of iambic pentameter, the collection of choric clowns -- literally wearing motley and jesters' caps -- who frequently pause the action for ham-handed eco-sermons, the clumsy magic realism, the stilted speech patterns and the cardboard characters combine to produce a relentlessly irritating reading experience.
The novel is meticulously researched. Rash knows exactly what brand of soap a woman would use to wash dishes in 1929 North Carolina. For that, I suppose, he is to be commended. He also has an admirably extensive knowledge of the Smokey Mountains' flora, fauna, and geology, of a sort that can only be produced by a deep connection to the land. Somewhere in this moldering mess is a beautiful love song to Appalachia. It's just too bad that it has to be encased in such a god awful novel.
Book Review: mmcdonald`
Summary: 5 Stars
In "Serena" the author's words mean something, everything; they are not wasted. Descriptions of the surroundings, the woods, the harsh environment, all tie into the life led by the woodsmen and Serena and George. Serena herself seems to embody this environment. Juxtaposed is the sexual, sensual relationship between George and Serena. She is the agressor, the hunter, the animalistic person, while George is mesmerized. Is he perhaps living his life through her, unable to be the man he thinks he should, based on the culture of the harsh reality in which he lives? The unborn child, to Serena, is another possession, a legacy, and when lost, like the woods they could not buy, anger is her response. Unable to purchase the timberland, Serena and George look elsewhere, not only in the state, but in Brazil, where Serena has a dream of striking it rich. When Serena loses her unborn to miscarriage, she transfers her rage to George's son, Jacob. Failure is not Serena's way. If she can not own it, than she will destroy it. Ironically, what Serena does with all her "possessions is to destroy them.
The book had multiple levels: a woman who fails to birth and raise a child; a woman who is ahead of her time in a man's world, a woman who has a failure of a moral compassion. George is not quite her equal and her contempt for his weakness, as she saw it, leads to a tragic end.
Mr. Rash's description of the leveling of the land for timber makes an environmentalist cringe; the word rape came to me mind while reading. Pull out the logs, slash and burn, no consideration for the workers, all in the the name of profit. Thus, as a sideline, this book describes the workings of a small lumber operation and how so much of the countryside, in the past, became denuded, losing creeks, rivers, fish, and creating mud slides and major landscape changes.
Few books have gripped me from beginning to end, but this is one of them. After I read this, I read "One Foot in Eden," Mr. Rash's earlier novel, and one can definitely see his growth in writing. "Eden", while good, did not have the tenor and pace of this book. However, I do recommend it.
Book Review: A disturbing book with a disturbing ending
Summary: 4 Stars
"Serena" tells the story of the title character and her husband, George Pemberton (almost always referred to by his last name throughout the book), and also of Rachel Harmon and her son by Pemberton, Jacob. It's clear from the outset of the story who the "bad guys" are, but the lines blur toward the end of the book.
The prose was lovely and the story a fairly solid look at mining in Appalachia country. I particularly liked the brief fleshing out of individual characters - though they only appeared for a short time, their stays were memorable (the doctor was a favorite of mine).
Serena herself, however, is immensely unlikable. I got the sense that there was another story behind her story, briefly glimpsed in conversations. She narrowly escaped the same fate as her parents in Colorado, the seemingly sociapathic way she zeroes in on men just like her, the brazenness of her speech in a time when educated, monied daughters didn't engage in sarcastic (and sometimes threatening) language. The book jacket mentions that Serena "shows herself to be the equal of any man"; I think it might better have read "any psychotic."
Serena goes to great distances to prove her equality - you might even say superiority - but doesn't seem to care what anyone thinks of her.
Husband Pemberton isn't much better - in the opening scene of the book, he murders the grandfather of his illegitimate child while Serena watches, well, serenely. It's a rather gruesome scene that serves not only as a precise sketch of the couple's character, but also as a very interesting, if macabre, bookend to the story.
This is no beach read, nor is it Cold Mountain or Stephen King. It's somewhere between the latter two, with interesting history and characterization set in an era that affects us even to this day. When one character, a slightly sloshed fellow lumber baron, proclaims that he and his wife will cut down all the forests in all the world, the seemingly minor subplot of creating a national forest is brought to forefront.