The Cove by Ron Rash – review

The author of The Cove lives in the Appalachian mountains of Carolina, where the story is set. Appalachia is, in American terms, old: long populated, with dialects and folkways that go back centuries. A poor land, misused, marginalised and, with its steep hills and deep misty valleys, very beautiful; not too far from Wales on the literary map. And indeed the book opens with a visit to a "cove", a small valley, that has been drowned by the building of a dam. Not a green valley, though. A dark one.
The story itself takes place before the dam was built, towards the end of the first world war, when American soldiers were dying or coming home wounded and war mania was whipped up by screaming posters and tales of Hun atrocities. German-Americans at that period were often ostracised or worse, carrying some of the weight of panic and suspicion that fell yet more heavily on Japanese-Americans in 1941 and which currently lies on any American with a name supposed to be "Arab" or "Muslim". Such hysteria is a characteristic of the home front in any war – Frieda and DH Lawrence were accused of signalling to the enemy from their Cornish cottage – and intelligent, well-meaning people get caught up in it.
Its importance in The Cove seems designed to give the story contemporary relevance. The villain is Chauncey Feith, a non-combatant army recruiter in a little Carolina town, an ignorant and cowardly man seething with envy, resentment, ambition, misogyny and every other prejudice, who has to content himself with persecuting the German professor at the local college as a traitor and spy until a greater prey comes into view. Chauncey is an unmitigated little skunk, judged and condemned by the author; nothing is left for the reader but to watch him do evil and earn his punishment. Unfortunately, such scapegoating oversimplifies the acutely troubling ethical questions that accompany hate and suspicion of "the enemy in our midst".
The story itself is very simple, very sad and either romantic or sentimental, depending on your taste. The cover declares that the book "recalls" John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy. A Steinbeck comparison has some validity – good narrative, simple folk, tragic doom – but the book's only similarity to McCarthy's pretentious prose and gloating violence might be in the casual, meaningless nature of the tragedy. The only protagonist who actually enacts his doom, a destiny followed out, is the little skunk: it's inevitable that he'll kill somebody.
The machinery of the tragedy depends less on character than on recognisable type. Laurel, a sensitive, beautiful young woman, set apart in the eyes of superstitious neighbours by a port-wine-stain birthmark, lives on a lonely farm with her kind, rough, but not insensitive brother Hank, who lost a hand in the war in France. The cove among the dark hills is a bad-luck place; nobody else lives there or wants to; but the brother and sister are accustomed to poverty and isolation. Laurel is looking forward to Hank bringing his bride home, but he hasn't had the courage to tell her that they're going to settle elsewhere, leaving her in the cove.
One day Laurel hears music in the woods, and soon after finds the hidden musician, apparently a tramp, near death from the stings of a swarm of wasps. They take him in, and learn that his name is Walter, and that he is mute from a childhood accident. Hank is busy fixing the place up for Laurel, a tough job for a one-handed man, and once he recovers, Walter gives him invaluable help. He plays lovely music on his silver flute. And Laurel falls in love with him as the blossom falls from the apple tree.
But Walter isn't mute; the reason for his silence is something else entirely … And so the story plays out. The greatest pleasure in it for me was the clear, rather mannered cadence of the prose and the author's fine ear for the speech rhythms of the rural South.
Ursula K Le Guin's Lavinia is published by Phoenix.