Book review: Above The Waterfall, Ron Rash

US writer Ron Rash . Photo / Mark Haskett

"Burdens are plenty in this world and they can pull us down in the lamentation. But the good Lord knows," spouts a preacher in quite the best passage in Ron Rash's sixth novel, "we need to see at least the hem of the robe of glory, and we do." The beauty and perfection of creation is visible, that is, beyond and among the meanness and ugliness perpetrated by fallen humanity, and we can all be saved.

That's pretty much what Above The Waterfall is about. Les is the sheriff of a no-consequence town in North Carolina - Deliverance country - where the jobs have all gone and the meth-heads have moved in. He's due to retire in just a few short weeks, but he's not going to have an easy ride to the exit. Tensions are simmering between Gerald, an elderly landowner, and his neighbour, the owner of a luxury fishing lodge who has designs on Gerald's land.

And there are always the clandestine meth labs to root out and break up: on one of these raids, the police find a local girl and her out-of-town, ex-con boyfriend high on drugs in one room with a baby in the microwave in the kitchen next door.

There is, then, no shortage of meanness and ugliness. But Les has a talent of seeing past the grubbiest veneer to the spark of the divine beyond, a talent he shares with Becky, a parks ranger in full retreat from the horrors in her own past who eases her tortured soul by communing with the natural world. It seems inevitable that Les and Becky will be drawn together.

The plot, such as it is, is a kind of whodunnit. When the luxury lodge's trout stream is poisoned with kerosene, suspicions naturally enough fall upon Gerald. This is unfortunate for Les, because he not only likes Gerald, but he also has a long-standing private financial arrangement with him relating to Gerald's marijuana-growing operation. So when Becky provides him with a reason to look for other possible explanations, Les needs little persuasion.

In the end, the narrative engine of Above The Waterfall isn't so much the plot as the slow unfolding of the characters of Les and Becky. The revelation of why it is that Becky spent a few years as a mute in her girlhood is masterfully handled. Les is not so convincing. It's hard to reconcile his essential goodness with the streak of corruption, even though we're given to understand he has changed with the passing of the years.

And while there is plenty to admire in the prose - the different voices of the characters and the descriptive passages are beautifully turned - and in the goodheartedness of the author, the book feels ever so slightly cobbled-together, with a will evident to canvas as many of the ills of contemporary America as possible: the decay of the countryside, environmental degradation, the scourge of drugs, greed, and so on.

In short, worth a read but hardly the stuff of lasting memories.

• Above The Waterfall by Ron Rash. (Text $37)

John McCrystal is a Wellington writer