Ron Rash’s novel beautifully written and compelling One Foot In Eden tells the story of a murder from different perspectives: the investigating sheriff, the accused, the wife of the accused, the son of the murdered man, and the sheriff’s deputy. The looming theme — and the name of the Valley in which most of the action takes place – - is “lost.” The characters are lost, pulled from their moorings of love, marriage, church, ancestry, and history. They are wandering in search of the path back to Eden, back to innocence and changelessness and faith. Their valley is scheduled to be flooded by the Carolina Power Company and with the flooding all history of that valley going back through centuries will be lost, forever hidden under the water. The words in this novel are perfectly crafted, evoking the different dialects of the south, portraying desperate lives, lost hopes, and deep longings, and immersing us in the history of this Valley of the Lost.
Set in the deep South in the mid-twentieth century, with the history of boys going off to war and proving their mettle — or their bloodthirstiness — as the backdrop, Rash’s novel explores what happens to those who go and to those who are left behind, and to those who come back. Not everyone can go to war and not everyone returns but everyone is defined by their experience. The characters are striving to anchor themselves. If the cost is one human life, so be it: the perpetrators know they will have to pay one day and when that day comes, they submit. But given the harshness of their lives, and the joy they find in the child, I was really, really hoping the murder would go unsolved, the flooding waters of the Power Company serving one good purpose, hiding one history better left forgotten.
Rash writes a wonderfully dark fable cum fairy tale, with two witches controlling the fates of the innocent and the not-so-innocent, an ingenious crippled prince, a lovely princess who does as one witch instructs and is cursed forever more by the other witch, a besotted villain, an innocent child, and a gallant observer of the law. Snakes are sacrificed, loyal beasts are slain, and potions ingested. To complete the fairy tale, there is Rumpelstilskin in the form of human longing: what won’t we do to satisfy that longing, and at what price? Sooner or later, we have to pay: there is no sudden discovery of that name that will save us; instead the real identity of the child is the undoing of the princess, in the end.
