A million ways to die in the Smoky Mountains

SERENA

By Ron Rash

371 pages

Available at National Book Store

If you’ve ever watched Seth MacFarlane’s A Million Ways to Die in the West, you know the running gag is that it isn’t just bad guys with guns you have to be afraid of out in the Wild, Wild West — it’s rattlesnakes, loose cattle, cholera, diarrhea, venereal disease, quack doctors, even getting your photograph taken. Death lurks everywhere.

Same with Serena, Ron Rash’s 2008 novel set in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina in 1929. The basis for the recent Jennifer Lawrence-Bradley Cooper movie (which flopped), Serena focuses on Harvard-educated George Pemberton who runs the Boston Lumber Company in a rugged landscape that harbors mountain lions, rattlesnakes, panthers, not to mention the ever-present threat of death by falling tree or misjudged axe swing. He operates his logging business with a firm hand, shedding the dandy tendencies of his northern partners and working as hard as his men. But he meets his match in the northern-educated Serena, a Colorado-raised woman of exceptional strength and cunning who quickly becomes his wife and proves to be more than his equal, in many ways. In fact, after a while, even the rattlesnakes don’t seem so scary.

You’d think the role would be a perfect fit for Lawrence, who’s hunted down drug dealers in Southern swamps in Winter’s Bone and even survived the Hunger Games.

But reading Rash’s novel is a much better experience than the sluggish movie, drawing you into its web of ruthless ambition from the opening pages. Serena shows her steely resolve first thing when she arrives at the train station outside the lumber camp, greeted by Pemberton and his partners. A young lady, several months’ pregnant with Pemberton’s child, is also waiting with her father at the platform. The father conceals a Bowie knife — clearly seeking justice for his daughter’s condition. Serena, quick to suss out the situation, urges Pemberton to take up his own knife and “settle it now” with the old man. (Which he does.) She then returns the father’s Bowie knife to Rachel, the unwed mother.

“Here,” Serena said, holding the knife by the blade. “By all rights, it belongs to my husband. It’s a fine knife, and you can get a good price for it, if you demand one. And I would. Sell it, that is. That money will help when the child is born. It’s all you’ll ever get from my husband and me.”

That is as cold as it gets, and Serena only gets harder and scarier as the novel goes along. But the movie version, directed by Susanne Bier, misses the opening conflict completely, focusing instead on the brief courtship between Pemberton (Cooper) and Serena: a few romps between the sheets, a few shots of her majestically riding her white Arabian horse. True, Bier may have wanted to establish Serena as an early feminist, a woman of great strength and resolve, the type no one would ever see coming in the rustic North Carolina setting. But she misses the dramatic pace of the novel.

Serena is, make no mistake, a Lady Macbeth figure in Rash’s book, goading her husband along to greater risks at every turn. She imports a Mongolian eagle and trains it to hunt down the rattlesnakes that torment the men in their logging duties; she even helps slay a bear that attacks Pemberton.

Her main talent, though, is using her sexual mojo to get Pemberton to go along with her machinations. Workers who are discourteous to Serena quickly find themselves out of work; business partners who prove uncooperative find themselves out of breath — forever. Or perhaps that’s merely a chauvinist take on the book. In truth, Serena is a force of nature, a formidable character worthy of Thomas Hardy, whatever her sex.

With Serena whispering in George’s ear, the Pembertons acquire everything they want — except a male heir. This is what sets the aptly named but lethal Serena on a course of elimination of her opponents — eventually turning into a battle of wills between single-mom Rachel and the fierce Serena. But as formidable as Serena is, she doesn’t reckon on the strength of a mother protecting her child.

Rash is a poet, and has the skill to lift what could be turgid drama into something more literary. For instance, once the Pembertons’ enemies start getting hunted down, a lesser novelist would have focused on the action, playing up the hunt. Instead, Rash has most of the killing done offstage. We learn, through the workers’ gossip, that yet another lawyer, doctor, or investor has met with an unfortunate “accident.”

The loggers themselves become a Greek chorus, quickly figuring out what levels George and Serena will go to ensure they get to fully denude the land — before the US government seizes it under “eminent domain.” So there’s an environmental message as well.

It’s weird, in a way, that a main character of the book is the National Forest Act, which was passed to protect hundreds of thousands of acres for public park use. But that’s what George and Serena are really up against: a race against the government to maximize profit before everything gets taken away, meanwhile endangering their workers (who routinely die in grim logging accidents) in the process.

We’ve seen a lot of books and movies about survival in the wilderness lately. Seth Macfarlane hit the nail on the head with his Million Ways to Die lampoon; no wonder people only had a life expectancy of 35 back in those days. In Serena, with all the pitfalls offered up by nature — let alone the schemes put into play by men and women — they might not even make it to 30.