Serena by Ron Rash – Macbeth diluted

The year is 1929, and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton arrive from Boston in the North Carolina mountains to create a timber empire. Serena is new to the mountains – but she soon shows herself the equal of any worker, overseeing crews, hunting rattlesnakes, even saving her husband’s life in the wilderness. Yet she also learns that she will never bear a child. Serena’s discovery will set in motion a course of events that will change the lives of everyone in this remote community. As the Pembertons’ intense, passionate marriage starts to unravel, this riveting story of love, passion and revenge moves towards its shocking reckoning.

This novel is a reworking of Shakespeare’s Macbeth which is, funnily enough, my favourite play. How I love it for its evil, its utter humanity and its tragic working of hope dashed. So when I was sent this one, I was very much looking forward to seeing what Mr Rash would do with this classic tale.

My overall feeling is that it tries hard, in certain places, but nothing will ever touch the magnificence of Macbeth. It starts off well enough, with Pemberton (Macbeth) and his new wife, Serena (Lady Macbeth), arriving home from honeymoon to see Pemberton’s erstwhile mistress, Rachel, and her father waiting for them to extract revenge for Rachel’s pregnancy and ruin. How I love a drama and that first scene is really very good indeed. Here, Serena is shown as strong-minded and individualistic, but also, like Pemberton, strangely distant.

It’s this sense of distance, sadly, that slowly and surely becomes the characteristic motif of both Pemberton and Serena, the latter of whom never really steps up to the mark in terms of being the title of the book, if you see what I mean. I never got to grips with either of them, and no matter how much they filled the pages in front of me in terms of words, they remained shadowy and unsympathetic throughout. All very odd and totally unlike Macbeth and Lady Macbeth who jump off the page in the play and are always, at least for me, utterly human and utterly sympathetic. Or possibly I’m just odd …

The real and unexpected star of this novel is, however, Rachel, Pemberton’s ex-mistress, and I have no real idea why she’s not in the title. As an aside (well, you’re allowed them in the theatre …), I did wonder if Rash chose to name his book after Serena in the same way that Du Maurier called her book about the second Mrs De Winter after the first, Rebecca. But in Du Maurier’s book, Rebecca is hugely powerful in her absence, and here Serena remains elusive and distant in spite of her presence and the effect of her murderous actions.

Anyway, back to Rachel. I loved her. We don’t see her at her best in that first scene, to be sure, but my goodness she stands proudly on the stage at all points thereafter. She is indeed where the story lies and I think this would have been a much better book if the whole of it had been from Rachel’s viewpoint, with the actions of Pemberton and Serena (whose allegedly all-consuming passionate love I never bought into, by the way) seen at a distance – where they in fact are. It’s Rachel who is the real protagonist. I loved her dealings with her new-born son, Jacob, and the life she tries to carve out for herself, and the feelings she expresses about her dead father are both moving and subtle. They made me stop, put the book down and think, which always impresses me. Towards the end, when Serena’s revenge is rising to its full height, and Rachel and Jacob must flee for their lives, with the help of the town’s sheriff, I was gripped, being desperate to know if they survived or not.

Apart from Rachel, there are other points I enjoyed about this book, even though Pemberton and Serena were on the whole a disappointment. For instance, I thought the “chorus” of the three workmen (AKA the witches) and their comments on what was happening around them and how they thought it might turn out were wonderful, and very clever indeed. Galloway (Serena’s tool for revenge) and his mother were powerful and very frightening figures also, and the ending and the coda were really very good. Plus Pemberton’s demise was expertly done and made me smile.

So, it’s a flawed novel, with the wrong main characters, but it certainly has much of interest in it, and, like Macbeth perhaps, reaches out for more than it can of its nature possibly fulfil. For that alone, it should be admired.

Serena, Canongate Books 2009, ISBN: 978 1 84767 4876

[Anne loves Macbeth as a play but is less certain of it as a modernised novel. However, she herself has used a classic work of literature as a jumping point for one of her own works of fiction, so she can’t really complain about others who do.]

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