Word: dickeys
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...canoe trip, naturally, turns into a disaster. Medlock's dream of being tested for survival becomes a nightmare of trial by terrors that Dickey finds in the wilderness and within himself. During the run down the river, all four men nearly drown in the rapids. Lewis Medlock breaks a leg in a spill from a canoe. The mutual-fund salesman is raped in an act of sodomy by two mountain people who beset the city slickers. Gentry tumbles from a cliff with the body of a mountain man whom he shot with a bow and arrow while defending himself...
...fast and shapely adventure tale is a rare enough creation. Dickey has surely achieved that. Just as surely he has reached for something more, a small classic novel in which action and reflection are matched and a man's return to primitive struggle produces some lasting fragment of interior knowledge. Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Faulkner's The Bear come most easily to mind...
...point, Deliverance can bear comparison with both books. Ultimately, it fails where they succeed. Dickey's spare narrative-leisurely at the start, then frantic-rushes the reader forward like the accelerating flow of the river. Whether he is describing the soft but fond suburban world that the four men leave at home, or evoking the impact of the plunging water, his language has a descriptive power not often matched in contemporary American writing...
...confront his men. Fearful of a rapids just ahead, Gentry imagines: "We would spin broadside and the whole river and all the mountains it came from would fall on us, would pour into the canoe, ton after ton, never ending." Part of the book's charm comes from Dickey's knowledge and love of the outdoors, of guitar playing, of archery. Dickey also manages an overwhelmingly graphic description of a man shot through the chest with a hunting arrow and slowly dying...
...Dickey's central failure is brief but crucial. It occurs at the heart of his narrative, when Gentry, after climbing a sheer cliff in the dark, shoots a potential ambusher from a tree and then sets out after the wounded enemy along a trail of blood in the forest. No single action is impossible to believe, but the accumulation-it eventually involves his singing a sort of victory song over the body and then lowering it from the edge of a cliff -is just a bit too much. Gentry's return to the atavistic past suddenly becomes...