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Philip Patrick's Reviews > Deliverance
Deliverance
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Like many of you, I imagine, I have a simple rule: read the book, then see the movie. But that didn’t happen with Deliverance. I saw the movie many years ago, and just now got to the book. At first it was hard to read the book—quite brilliant in its descriptive power—without seeing Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, and Jon Voight. But in a testament to the book, slowly they slipped away and the power of the page prevailed.
The plot is well-known: four buddies embark on a canoe trip down the a river in rural Georgia before it is dammed for hydroelectric power. Two locals attack them viciously, and what happens from there is a blend of retribution, survival, loss, and lies to hold it all together.
There are many levels at work in Deliverance, but what struck me was its exploration into the horrific intersection of sex and violence. It isn’t easy reading. At the outset the narrator, Ed, is working on at an ad agency where a model is about to pose half-naked. She is wearing a towel and when it drops “she looked like someone who had come to womanhood in less than a minute.” The next morning, before embarks on this river trip, Ed and his wife make love. It is passionate, but comfortable with what a poet friend of mine called the long experience of love.
Then everything changes. The trip, the attack.
So here we have it: in a just over a hundred pages, the voyeur, the partner, the attacker, the victim are bunched uncomfortably close to one another, and, to borrow from Norman MacLean, a river runs through it. But here the river is neither benign, nor beautiful. It is, from turn to turn, menacing and deadly and claustrophobic. As it runs inexorably downhill, the horrific events and the lies that follow are left upriver where the men can only hope they will remain buried forever.
Was James Dickey suggesting that men are a sum of these parts? Or at least capable of them? Are these various beasts much closer to one another than we like to admit? And how do we react when confronted with the shock of this recognition? These questions are the real river in this book, the downhill force that makes for a complicated journey.
The writing in Deliverance is keen and Dickey drops the hammer mercilessly. That pummeling of the senses, of the heart, leads to a great deal of thought, yes, but at the end one of the four men says, “Come on for God’s sake. Let’s leave this place” and it is hard to disagree.
The plot is well-known: four buddies embark on a canoe trip down the a river in rural Georgia before it is dammed for hydroelectric power. Two locals attack them viciously, and what happens from there is a blend of retribution, survival, loss, and lies to hold it all together.
There are many levels at work in Deliverance, but what struck me was its exploration into the horrific intersection of sex and violence. It isn’t easy reading. At the outset the narrator, Ed, is working on at an ad agency where a model is about to pose half-naked. She is wearing a towel and when it drops “she looked like someone who had come to womanhood in less than a minute.” The next morning, before embarks on this river trip, Ed and his wife make love. It is passionate, but comfortable with what a poet friend of mine called the long experience of love.
Then everything changes. The trip, the attack.
So here we have it: in a just over a hundred pages, the voyeur, the partner, the attacker, the victim are bunched uncomfortably close to one another, and, to borrow from Norman MacLean, a river runs through it. But here the river is neither benign, nor beautiful. It is, from turn to turn, menacing and deadly and claustrophobic. As it runs inexorably downhill, the horrific events and the lies that follow are left upriver where the men can only hope they will remain buried forever.
Was James Dickey suggesting that men are a sum of these parts? Or at least capable of them? Are these various beasts much closer to one another than we like to admit? And how do we react when confronted with the shock of this recognition? These questions are the real river in this book, the downhill force that makes for a complicated journey.
The writing in Deliverance is keen and Dickey drops the hammer mercilessly. That pummeling of the senses, of the heart, leads to a great deal of thought, yes, but at the end one of the four men says, “Come on for God’s sake. Let’s leave this place” and it is hard to disagree.
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Reading Progress
February 13, 2008
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Started Reading
February 23, 2008
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Mark,Thanks for the kind words about my review. I appreciate them tremendously. What is nicer than the call and response nature of GR?
I'll certainly add "To the White Sea" to my to-read. Always love to have a good recommendation up my sleeve when I wander into a bookstore.
Happy reading,
Bloom
I hope I'll feel the same. I too have long-stale memories of the movie clamoring in the back of my mind. At the same time, at least when I first saw it, I could envision Burt Reynolds as the nominal bad-ass Dickey's writing. He was correctly cast, though it will be hard to watch today with the book club, without eliciting guffaws. So far, for me the writing is too macho: I never liked hemingway. It's a cultural time warp. There are still real men today, and they face the same issues, but are quieter about it.
I don't know if it makes any sense to reply to an old post, but but what is worth here it is; I've never seen the Deliverance movie. However, when it comes to reading a real good book, not necessarily a masterpiece but a gem nevertheless, I prefer to stay with the literary content, and so I purposely will ignore the film, regardless of the genre. Just a few examples for me, The Kite Runner, The executioner's Song, and recent, The Revenant. These are books that when you delve into them and really get what the author conveys in it, you don't need to see a melodrama full of overacting and special effects.
Awesome review! I say (even though somebody else has spuriously claimed authorship) "never judge a book by its movie." I highly recommend Dickey's book "To the White Sea." Just the goose down episode makes it worth reading. Although the violence and bloodshed is almost non-stop, there is justification for it, and it worked for me; like Deliverance, I couldn't put it down.
Mark