Serena

Ron Rash’s Serena was a page-turner. Not so much as a thriller, but because as a reader, you became invested in what happened to the characters, especially Rachel and her little boy. The scenery was vivid, and the use of local color and real-life people, places and occurrences helped make everything seem more real. I appreciated the detail of the loggers’ lives and hard work, the matter-of-fact way they went about their jobs. A lot of my family logged “way back when”, and although I’m sure the process was much improved from the time of the story, it was still pretty primitive and dangerous.
Serena was an interesting character, and I could clearly see the allusions to Lady Macbeth as others have mentioned, with her seemingly endless plotting of murders and having others to carry out the evil deeds; Serena differs from Lady Macbeth in that she doesn’t suffer from guilt- she expects it be done, and she gets Pemberton to do her bidding by convincing him that they are building an empire, that he is protecting his future, in essence, being a man. She charms him, and ultimately, all the men around her, in one fashion or another. There is also the touch of the supernatural, although in this case there is Galloway’s blind-but-“seeing” mother instead of the witches of Macbeth.
Rachel is the good mother, the scorned woman who suffers for the love of a man and child. Serena does all she does because she is jealous of Rachel and the power she has over Pemberton- Serena cannot provide Pemberton with a child, and she will not allow anyone else to have what she cannot. If these two were the two mothers before King Solomon fighting over a baby, Rachel would have handed over the baby to Serena to save it, Serena would have surrendered it for cleaving in half.
My favorite part of the book was the loggers and the conversations they had among themselves. They were surprisingly articulate and well-read for loggers, and had quite interesting things to say about the state of the forest and the world to come. They were helpful in the progress of the story, as they helped fill-in the blanks of the action, some of the things that we didn’t read about. The beginning of chapter thirty-five is when Snipe’ crew has cut the last tree; the men are discussing not only how the Sheriff has died, but how Rachel and her baby got away. We see how the men were aware of what was going on and how Galloway was involved. The men survey the wasteland around them, and compare what’s left to the annihilation left after WWI. They accurately talk about their part in the destruction, how they had no choice, “had to feed [their] families”, and the most surprising line comes from the recently silent McIntyre, who says “I think this is what the end of the world will be like”.