Deliverance reads like an adventure novel and arguably, punches above its weight — it has a compelling premise and storyline which makes it a page turner. I think it becomes more popular than it should be because it speaks to a lot of people that fits the profile of the main character: a somewhat successful middle-aged, middle-class parent who has the casual ourdoorsy hobby. A couple of kids and white picket fence maybe.
These kinds of bloke would always know that one guy who they always look up to, because even in middle age, we’re all just high school undergrads who’s always looking up to the popular kid who’s drinking beer even before the legal drinking age, and his six pack is definitely way better than those scrawny contractions you call arms. Ed is the simp, Lewis is the jock. Ed isn’t doing too badly at all, he’s a VP in a boutique agency (what more middle-class than marketing?), Lewis is a happy camper who’s archery skills is the envy of Brad Pitt’s Achilles and goes out to camp all the time that his skin becomes rhino-like, but in a hot envy of other men kind of way.
They decided to rough it in a soon-to-be dammed wilderness, starting from upstream and run through the unchartered rapids before work starts again on Monday (because this is what normal people do in the weekends right?). They’ve decided to bring a couple of mates with them, city boys too who didn’t know what’s a peg from a canoe. Everything was well and good until they met a couple of hicks who made them do all sorts of weird shit. If you’ve seen the movie, that’s exactly what happened in the book. Their supposive self-contained adventure quickly became a swashbuckling adventure being pursued by redneck vitriol. “Roughing it” is understating what they have to go through.
There is a draw in the main protagonist here — Ed is not an entirely useless individual. He can pitch a tent, row a canoe unlike his mate Bobby, his archery ain’t so bad either. But he just gets by when put outdoors, at least until the events in the book. He is happy to go with the flow in a path determined by the more strong-minded Lewis, and to make it out alive to start work on Monday is more than enough. Ed started off passive, civil and safe — there are streaks of an animalistic urge within him that may be repressed. We can see bits and pieces of this coming out when he caught a glimpse of the gold streaks on the face of the naked model in his agency.
But when Lewis is incapacitated, Ed had to thrive lest they’d all perish in the middle of nowhere. Deliverance is about the discovery of this drive to survive — the animalistic tendency of ants scrambling when it’s sprayed with the oddly fragrant Baygon. But the book makes it clear that this drive to survive is not for everyone. It is not just the physical drive to survive, but also the intellectual effort for it. Survival became a game of chess in the bushes of Southern Appalachia as Ed tries to figure out where the next attack is coming from.
Deliverance is not a difficult book to finish, if you consider the prose and not the subject matter. I wouldn’t go as far to say that it’s the most well written book of the genre. Its style can be dry and purely descriptive, but it does drive the story forward. I’ve never bought into Ed as a narrator, as I thought he was boring to begin with, especially in the introduction of the book when he was just getting by with his job. I suppose this was the whole point? There is something offputting in Ed’s tone that just doesn’t sit with me. Plainly speaking, I just couldn’t like the guy. Nor any of the characters.
These are the two main issues that I had with the book: the characters that I can’t relate to and the prose that’s no better than most bestsellers. Maybe to another middle-classed middle-aged bloke who picked up this book, this book will resonate. There is an inherent ardor for men to validate their masculinity, and if they lack the fortitude or the effort to do what these men tried to do, then reading about it will do. I don’t doubt that men have gone to buy tents and a canoe after having read Deliverance.
