Blaine's Reviews > Deliverance

“Here we go,” he said, “out of the sleep of mild people, into the wild rippling water.”
…
The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence.
…
“I think,” I said, “that we’ll never get out of this gorge alive.”

It’s 1970, and four friends decide to take a weekend trip to go canoeing on a river that’s about to be wiped off the map by a new dam in the northern part of Georgia. Led by hyper-macho Lewis, the only one with much experience, they take to the river despite warnings from locals that it’s too dangerous. But when they’re attacked by two men, their survival depends on coming out on top of a kill-or-be-killed situation….

Though a huge bestseller when released, the novel Deliverance was quickly eclipsed by the movie in popular culture. The sections where the characters are actually canoeing are still quite powerful, capturing the beauty of the wilderness experience when things are smooth and the exhilaration and fear of being at nature’s mercy in the rapids. And the scenes of the final confrontation above the river are also well-written and absorbing.

But the story in Deliverance is weak in some places and odd in others. Our narrator Ed is bored with his job, wife, life, and is looking for something else, “another life, deliverance.” Yawn. This midlife crisis theme was played out even by 1970. Meanwhile, Lewis is obsessed with the idea of society breaking down and being forced to leave the city and try to survive, which is too on the nose given what’s about to happen. There’s something vaguely homophobic about the way the rape scene unfolds and is viewed by the four men. Yet throughout the book, Ed thinks about Lewis in ways that are hard to read as anything other than sexual attraction. It’s like the movie Top Gun, somehow homophobic and homoerotic at the same time. And finally, when the survivors return home, they basically act as though everything they experienced never happened, depriving the reader of seeing how these extraordinary events in fact would have impacted their lives going forward.

Deliverance regularly appears on lists of the 100 greatest novels. As an adventure thriller, with a turning point that probably shocked readers in 1970, I can see why it got attention. And it’s better than other books from the 1970s that regularly appear on such lists: Dog Soldiers, Falconer, and Ragtime. But the farther we get from them the more apparent it is that the 1970s were a wasteland of literature. There are so many better thrillers from the past 50 years that should displace Deliverance on these lofty lists.