Review: Deliverance

Deliverance by James Dickey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think James Dickey’s “The Heaven of Animals” is one of the most compelling poems of the last half century. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily among the very best – although it could be – but that it’s a call to consider our place in the world as either predator or prey. It happens to be powerfully written, and I’ve found it one of the best things to teach in introductory college literature settings, but above all it asks us to consider who we are if we neither hunting nor being hunted.

After all these years, I’d never read Deliverance. If you grew up when I did, though, you knew the song “Dueling Banjos” and you knew the phrase, “Squeal like a piggy” – neither of which I really understood at age 10 and neither of which appears directly in the novel. Still, now that I’ve read this, I understand both the power of the film (which I have never seen all the way through) and more of what Dickey may have been driving at in “The Heaven of Animals.”

Half of this book is the poetic meditation I expected on the distinction between the tedium of civilization and the thrill of life-as-survival. It opens with our narrator, Ed Gentry, recounting the irritating details of his life as an advertising executive. He’s worked to stay tough, but he’s in awe of his handsomer, stronger, more capable friend Lewis. So, when Lewis proposes a trip down the river through a north Georgia river about to be dammed up, it seems a last chance to grasp a vanishing outdoor world.

It's worth noting as well that the book ends in a similar “civilized” conflict – this one between potential conflicting stories about what took place on the river, in the inaccessible places of the world.

The other half of this book, though, is a classic thriller. It’s the middle section, and it pits man against man in a life-or-death showdown. Ed is initially hunted, and then he does the hunting.

This part is “Heaven of Animals” made literal, but a lot of the poetry gets lost in the translation. We get some powerful language about despair and last remnants of strength being just sufficient to the task, but somehow the urgency of the insight gets lost. Ed does what he has to do survive, but it certainly doesn’t ennoble him, and it doesn’t quite seem to give him the purpose that the poem celebrates. There’s nothing awe-inspiring about his [SPOILER] sending a razor-sharp arrow into a man’s throat. It’s an ugly and bloody instant.

To be fair, Dickey drives that point home by having Ed fall on his own arrow in the same exchange. Ed nearly kills himself in the moment of the killing that he does, and I admire the ambiguity that gives us. Much of its potential for poetry vanishes, though, under the weight of the thriller unspooling around it: we want to know whether Ed will survive.

As a bottom line, then, I do recommend this book – one I saw on every shelf of every one of my friends’ parents in the middle 1970s. I can’t tell how well it holds up altogether, and it’s particularly disturbing in this Trump era to see how much of it turns on the fundamental inability for the ‘elites’ of the city to communicate with the left-behind people of the rural spaces. In the end, though, Dickey is such a talented wordsmith, and he’s wrestling with such primal questions, that the still-thrilling conflict at the heart doesn’t entirely obscure the poetic question that lies even deeper.


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