Deliverance

Deliverance
by James Dickey
read: 2011
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #42, Guardian 1000 Novels

I've spent a few posts recently talking about my love / hate relationship with the writing of Cormac McCarthy.  McCarthy's world is full of gruff, strong, Hemingwayesque heroes and anti-heroes in a merciless world where they must kill or be killed.  The people and the situations aren't really relatable for me, but despite that McCarthy manages to hit on universal elements in the human condition.

James Dickey creates a similar situation in Deliverance, but he also does something else.  Ed Gentry isn't an inscrutable symbol of the West; he's a mild-mannered graphic designer who is thrust into a kill-or-be-killed setting that isn't dissimilar from the environment in McCarthy's world.  Through Ed, the reader explores multiple aspects of the relationship between modern society and this more primitive world, a rural river in Georgia.  The country is beautiful but dangerous.  The denizens of the river are territorial - even to the point of murder - but they have cause to be distrustful, as there are already plans to dam up the river and turn it into a lake for further developments.  Ed's experience on the river is the worst thing that ever happened to him, but at the same time the reader gets the impression that he wouldn't go back and undo it if he could.  This tension between the positives and negatives of the primitive world, and how we think about our modern life in relation to it, makes Deliverance one of the best novels I read in 2011.