Deliverance

Deliverance, published in 1970, was the first novel by the American poet James Dickey. It is told in the first person by Ed Gentry, a graphic artist in a large Georgia city who joins three friends for a weekend of canoeing on the Cahulawassee River.

The organiser is Lewis Medlock, a fit and forceful outdoorsman who has decided that the four of them should run the river before a dam drowns it. Lewis's companions are Ed, the insurance salesman Bobby Trippe and the soft-drink executive Drew Ballinger, and Ed's account of the trip is also an account of how badly they have misjudged the place. At a filling station in the mountains they are already out of their depth, and the encounter there colours everything that follows. The novel gives the river its own weight: the current, the gorge, the sound of water in a stone canyon, and the sense of a country that has not been arranged for visitors. What begins as recreation becomes a test of what each man will do to stay alive, and Ed's voice stays level even when the situation does not.

Dickey had made his name as a poet, and the book reads like a poet's prose, economical and attentive to sound. Its four men are not adventurers so much as city people on holiday, which is what gives the story its uncomfortable edge.