***Book Review***

Deliverance
(1970)
review by Died with Boots On

Il existe à la base de la vie humaine,
un principe d’insuffisance.

It is a principle that is basic to human survival,
one that does not sufficiently coincide with anything else.

James Dickey writes a mean novel.  Since the summer, I’ve read ‘The Man Who Was Thursday,’ ‘The Time Traveler's Wife,’ ‘A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder,’ and ‘Deliverance.’  Out of the four, ‘Deliverance’ was easily my favorite.  I didn’t start out liking it.  I thought the pacing was off kilter and the dialogue a little too colloquial to the point where it just sounded forced.  But what I soon realized is that ‘Deliverance’ is an acquired taste.  Dickey is allowed to devote the first hundred pages to character development because he has a false-climax and a climax that are well worth the wait.  Even when the unfolding action isn’t particularly interesting, his exposition is chockfull of sensory detail and sexual undertones that foreshadow the tragic twist the plot takes later on.  Not only that, but it’s a novel that aged well.

Just this past summer, ‘The Descent’ came out.  To me, ‘The Descent’ was just ‘Deliverance’ with tomboyish women instead of men and a cave instead of a river.  Even the characters are similar.  In ‘Deliverance,’ the four protagonists include: Ed – the narrator – a design artist content to live his life without actively participating in it; Lewis – Ed’s best friend – a lone wolf who wishes he could live in a post-apocalyptic, dog-eat-dog world; Drew, whose one and only love is to play the guitar; and Bobby, a stock protagonist who was never meant to go on the canoeing misadventure.  In ‘The Descent,’ Natalie Jackson Mendoza’s character, Juno, is very much like Lewis.  Both characters are the catalyst, the driving force for disaster.  Shauna Macdonald’s character, Sarah, is the ‘Ed’ of Neil Marshall’s movie, undergoing an animalistic metamorphosis that leaves her a killing machine.  Alex Reid’s character, Beth, is stock, placed in the movie to suffer from Juno’s poor judgment.  In this way, she is like Bobby.  While Drew isn’t a good parallel of the mother/daughter pair, both kept low profiles throughout each story.

I don’t mean to say that Neil Marshall plagiarized his peice; only that James Dickey’s powerful work of literature lives on through this incarnation.  While the antagonistic settings are similar, the antagonists are not.  Where Marshall creates a race of echolocating, banshee-screaming, bone-crunching fictional predators that swarm the cave like horseflies on the dead carcass of a deer, Dickey uses two toothless “Honorary Deputy Sheriff” country bumpkin hillbillies with one shotgun between them.  Perhaps the greatest thing about ‘Deliverance’ is that it had the grit and grain of something that could actually happen.  There was nothing larger than life about the antagonists.  Not that I know anything about Appalachia or the Deep South, but it certainly preyed on my preconceived fears.

Divided into five chapters, the structure of the book is very cool and well organized.  The first is ‘Before.’  This chapter sets up the trip into the heart of Georgia’s untamed wilderness.  Lewis twists his friend’s arms into canoeing down the Cahulawassee River with him before it’s dammed and flooded.  He wants an excuse to get out of the office for a few days and leave the city behind.  On some subconscious level, so do the other men.  The next three chapters happen over the course of three days, September 14th, September 15th, and September 16th.  The last chapter is ‘After.’  Once the men get into the little town of Oree, Lewis finds three men who will drive their two cars downriver to Aintry.  Drew duels banjos with an albino boy at a filling station.  Once they find the river, they wade in knee-deep, get into their canoes, and shove off.  They spend the day acclimating to the current of the river, to the hot sun overhead.  They paddle through a section plastered with chicken feathers, a slaughterhouse for chickens.  They find a flat embankment that they beach their canoes on as dusk sets in.  They pitch their tents and make a campsite.  That night, while they’re asleep in their sleeping bags, Ed is awakened as his tent bunches up right above his head, as a long, thick finger penetrates the thin material of the tent.  His heart skips a beat, but then he realizes it’s the talon of an owl.  A big owl is perched on his tent, a predator of the night, a forewarning of things to come.  The next day, the men continue down the river.  Ed and his partner, Bobby, get far ahead of Lewis and Drew.  Once Ed begins to feel sunburn on his bald spot, and his muscles lock up, he suggests they pull off the river for a little and wait for the others.  They find a good place to beach the canoe, and they get out onto the shore.  They walk into the shade of the trees, and find themselves with a shotgun barrel in their faces.  Two grizzly hicks, one slender and gangly, the other short and potbellied, wave the gun around in the air as they tie Ed to a tree with his own belt and rape Bobby over a log at gunpoint.  Ed keeps looking out at the river while Bobby screams in pain, knowing that Lewis and Drew must have passed them by now, that the punishment for sodomy in these parts is death, so after they have their way with them, they will surely kill them.

This book is one hell of a psychological thriller.  With thrills and chills that send shivers down your spine and give you Goosebumps, ‘Deliverance’ documents the communion of man with beast, of man with nature.  We can only take so much butchering and psychological warfare before our brains shell the complexities of human nature, before our bodies revert into something biologically simplistic, primal, transforms into something with a higher threshold for pain, something with a stronger coping mechanism.  This book describes what happens to four city men who get down on all fours and pretend that they’re animals…they get hunted like animals.

Like I said before, I’ve never seen the movie, but I do know that James Dickey wrote the screenplay.  I also know that he makes a cameo appearance as the Aintry Sheriff toward the end.  To me, that means that the movie is a pretty loyal adaptation – if it can even be called an adaptation and not a literal translation – and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a lot of the original dialogue made its way into the motion picture.  Dickey is a visceral writer, but also an author with literary merit.  ‘Deliverance’ is filled with animal motifs, sexual undertones, foreshadowing, and conceits that turn such a graphically disturbing novel into something beautiful and rich, into something that isn’t a guilty pleasure, but a haunting life lesson.  ‘Deliverance’ did for the South what ‘Jaws’ did for the Jersey shores.  It’s a fantastic book and a very quick read, and I highly recommend it.