One fell swoop accounts for the land

The harshness of settler life in the United States is the stuff of legend, but danger and lawlessness was not confined to the prairies and deserts that have come to epitomise the American frontier.

SERENA
Ron Rash
Text, $39, pbk

Reviewed by Cushla McKinney

In Serena, the reader is presented with an equally uncompromising environment in which man and nature battle for control.

The year is 1929, and George Pemberton is carving an empire from the hardwood forests of North Carolina.

It is hard, dangerous work with a high mortality rate, but during the Depression workers are both cheap and expendable.

This is a world where women are a rarity at the best of times, let alone one who is the equal of the hardened men who work the felling lines.

Yet from the day of her arrival, Pemberton's new bride, Serena, asserts her dominance over the entire logging camp, and her shrewd eye for business soon sees her deferred to in all aspects of management.

She is also as able a hunter as any in the county, and rides out to oversee the men, carrying a massive eagle she has trained to kill the rattlesnakes that infest the woods.

Together she and Pemberton work to expand their business, and Serena will let nothing stand in the way of her plans.

Throughout the novel she embodies the forces of disruption, like the incarnation of a vengeful classical goddess on her white horse with her eagle at her wrist, and death accompanies her from her first appearance.

It seems only fitting that the one thing she cannot do is bear her husband a child, unlike the kitchen-hand who preceded her in Pemberton's bed, and who becomes the focus of Serena's hatred.

Familiar political tensions also appear, with Washington intending to declare the whole area a national park, while the Pembertons are determined to extract the full financial value from the forest before moving on to the unprotected riches of Brazil.

The state may get the land, but it will be a wasteland of stumps and mud.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

Although primarily a thriller and a study in one woman's all-too-human evil, it is also a novel strongly of time and place.

Serena's calculating, amoral ambition is contrasted with the impersonal perils of the land itself and the toll it takes on the men who seek to exploit it.

The lives (and deaths) of the loggers intersperse the main plot and are as interesting as the central story.

Suspenseful and well-paced, events unfold with a dismaying and tragic inevitability.

As petty as it sounds, I was irritated by minor typographical errors and wrong notes (nobody I know burps a 2-year-old child after feeding), but this reflects the extent to which I became immersed in what I was reading.

Such flaws jolted me back to reality most unwelcomely.

Serena was "book of the year" in several United States publications, and I can understand why.

• Dr McKinney is a Dunedin scientist.