Deliverance - James Dickey

 

James Dickey's Deliverance is a remarkable novel. The first time I read it, in mid-1971, I appreciated the novel for its sensationalism and thrilling plot about four city slickers who are forced into a kill-or-be-killed battle of wits and weapons in the Georgia backwoods that will redefine their lives. This second reading of Deliverance, however, has left me thinking about aspects of the novel I barely considered in 1971. Maybe that's because I'm (hopefully) a better reader than I was 53 years ago, but more likely it's simply because I realize now what people (even some of the "good" ones) are capable of doing to each other when they think they can get away with it.

The city boys are:

• Ed - an ad agency art director who also serves as Dickey's narrator,
• Lewis - the muscle-bound self-appointed leader of the group who has supreme confidence in his leadership abilities and physical prowess,
• Drew - a financial advisor specializing in mutual funds, and
• Bobby - a sales manager for a soft drink company.

The four men are happy enough with their work, but each of them craves a break in their daily routine, some kind of weekend adventure that will rejuvenate them by for another few months of what their daily lives have become. So when Lewis, who is also a champion archer, hits them with the idea of a canoe trip down a river valley that is about to be dammed up and flooded forever, it doesn't take much prodding to get the other three men to agree to the idea. And despite their complete lack of experience, and not not having a clue about what to expect ahead of them, all goes relatively well the first day.

Nothing, though, could have prepared the group for the violence and death they would face on the morning of the second day when two of them are viciously set upon by two of the scariest predators on the face of the planet: human beings prepared to take everything they own from them, including their sense of dignity and self-worth. Even though what happens in a sudden burst of explosive violence leaves Ed, Lewis, Drew, and Bobby shaken to their core, they know they can't allow the truth of what they did ever to be told - and then they realize that their attackers feel the same. There's only one solution...kill or be killed.

And this is when the novel changes from a thriller into something deeper in which Dickey explores the mind of a good man pushed to the brink, a man who comes to the realization that in order to protect himself, his family, and the only life they have ever known, he is going to have to become a completely different man than the one he believes himself to be. Can he do it? Should he do it? These questions are what make Deliverance so different a novel than the one I first read in 1971.

James Dickey, who died in 1997, was primarily a poet. He was an avid outdoorsman and archer who made his reputation as a National Book Award in Poetry winner and eighteenth United States Poet Laureate in 1966. Ironically enough, he is best known today for his first novel, Deliverance, which was followed by Alnilam in 1987 and To the White Sea in 1993.