There is an old saying: ‘Make haste. Slowly.’ That is how it feels when you read Deliverance, by James Dickey. Like a simple, slow burn that is coming down to a nub. There is a sense of elegance, danger, and mankind instinctively fighting back against the elements and the wild to find something akin to peace. I really enjoyed this book (for what it is worth, it is even rated among the top novels of all time on some lists).

This is the tale of three normal guys – the main character, Ed, is an advertising executive at a small town firm – who decide they need to face nature. The fourth character, Lewis, is larger than life and obsessed with survival out in the wild. He “wanted to be immortal.” Yet even Lewis has a normal life with a wife and three kids and a 9-to-5, but “he couldn’t make it work” and feels he must conquer his primal self. So Lewis convinces the others to head out for a weekend canoe trip in the Appalachian hills of Georgia. Ed idolizes the lack of fear in Lewis, and is bored with his life, so he follows. By the end of the book, Ed proves better than his fear; however, along the way, things do not go as planned.

The book was made into a relatively famous 1972 movie with Jon Voight as Ed and Burt Reynolds as the overly adventuresome Lewis.* The movie is known for a certain dueling banjos scene…and another scene that I won’t discuss as it will spoil the entire story. I had never seen the movie, and once I finished the book, I downloaded it. The movie is slow, in the way that older movies sometimes are. It enjoys itself in the slowness, like a memory of the past swirling in the back of your mind. It was good – but the book was better.

What spoke to me from the book was the way Dickey encapsulates one of the struggles of modern life: it can be boring. We yearn for adventure, but spend most of our time in an office. Ed is bored with his life in advertising, and Lewis takes him on an adventure, yet the trip turns into something far more brutal and visceral than they expected. The book opens with this dichotomy: of indifference and boredom contrasted against the excitement of the river and man versus nature. The second part of the book is about the struggle, about facing the wild by putting aside societal norms in order to survive. It reminded me of the life of Hobbes’ mankind: nasty and brutish and short. Finally, the book ends with a return to civilization, and after having changed and adapted to survive, the party finding a way to both cover up their actions as brutes and return to the comforts of modernity. There is even a rather heavy handed metaphor slicing through the story, as the raging river they venture forth on for their canoe trip is about to be drowned out by the building of dam, just as Lewis thinks the essence of mankind is being drowned out by civilization, suburbia, and strip malls.

I think what I enjoyed most was the slowness and the sense of surrealism. The river is made of “alertness and resourcefulness as it split apart at rocks, frothed lightly, corkscrewed, fluted, fell, recovered, jostled into helmet-shapes over smooth stones, and then ran out of sight down long garden-staircase steps around another turn.” As Ed summited a cliff for a crucial showdown, he stops and realizes “there was a new light on the water; the moon was going up and up, and [he] stood watching the stream with [his] back to the rock for a few minutes, not thinking of anything, with a deep feeling of nakedness and helplessness and intimacy.” I felt like I understood Ed and where he was. This showed up in the movie as well, with the quick pace of the dueling banjos and the obvious fun the actors were having pushing forward in their canoes.

The story ends with Ed and Lewis content, and together, on another body of water. They grow old in their lake houses next to each other, knowing “that dying is better than immortality.” It is a good ending.

Score: 8.5. A little brutal if you get squeamish, but worth the trip downriver.

 

* In 2010, I visited the Burt Reynolds and Friends Museum in Jupiter Florida.  The canoe and bow from the movie were on display. Unfortunately, the museum closed in 2012.