Deliverance by James Dickey

“That’s all anybody has got. It depends on how strong your fantasy is, and whether you really — really — in your own mind, fit into your own fantasy, whether you measure up to what you’ve fantasized. I don’t know what yours is, but I’ll bet you don’t come up to it.”

Wow. Not what I expected at all, but I ended up really liking it. I’ve never seen the movie; all I’ve heard is scary hillbillies and dueling banjos. I think I was expecting a horror novel, and it’s not (not that horrible things don’t happen!). It kind of reminded me of that Kevin Bacon movie, A River Wild. Just some normal folks, out for a camping trip, when suddenly they’re confronted by some evil people, and forced to make decisions that they never would have expected.

The main theme of this novel, or what I came away with, is: what exactly does it mean to be a man? The main character, Ed, is a normal guy. He has a job, a wife and a kid. He’s good at his job — doesn’t exactly love it, but it pays the bills and gives him some freedom. He loves his family, even though he occasionally fantasizes about other women. When his friend Lewis pitches a canoe trip with some buddies, an opportunity to test their mettle in the great wide wilderness, Ed doesn’t really want to go, but tags along because he can see it means a lot to Lewis. The river is going to be dammed–destroying the wildness of nature to create more boring homes and offices–and if that’s not a metaphor for these men then I don’t know what is.

Lewis is a completely different person. He works out religiously, convinced that in the end, your body will save you. By “the end”, he’s envisioning some sort of nuclear winter (after all, Dickey wrote this book in 1970). He sees the trip as a way to test his readiness, his ability to be a man. Lewis reminds me a lot of these doomsday preppers you see nowadays: focused on surviving the apocalypse.

Two other men join them: honest Drew and soft Bobby. They have lesser roles but in their own way, lend definition Lewis and Ed through their actions and what actions fall on them.

Of course, during the course of the trip, disaster strikes and the men are forced to react. How they do so, and the subsequent consequences, reveal their character in new ways (not always pleasant). Deliverance has great substance, and though it was written nearly 45 years ago, shines a bright light on human nature when a person has been reduced to merely a primal need to survive.