A review by huncamuncamouse
Deliverance, by James Dickey
3.0
It's probably 3.5, but I feel mean. Also, the movie was better. My big issue is that I think about 80 pages could have been cut. There's an overwhelming amount of description, and it becomes tedious. There's not enough differentiation--the description is either all about describing the way in which someone walked or climbed something in the forest, or the way tree leaves appeared. I was not surprised to learn the author is a poet, and I don't mean this as an insult. It is clear he has an eye for detail, but less could have been more to keep the quite compelling plot moving forward.
There's a lot of interesting ideas here about the banality of suburban and family life, masculinity, the tension between the spreading suburban world and the "uncharted," and the fateful meeting between city slickers (all but Drew were dismissive of the locals) and the indigenous people (not all of which, surprisingly, were presented as "backwards," although enough cliches persist to make me uneasy).
The issue, too, of male-on-male sexual assault is interesting, especially the shame/inability to ever admit what happened, which largely drives the group's decisions. So rarely do I find that sexual assaults in fiction serve a purpose other than to brutalize characters and shock readers. This was a welcome exception--and handled better than the "squeal" line in the movie, which was ad-libbed.
Over-all, the book is a bit slow and hasn't aged well in many ways (a slur is used on the last page, as just one example), but it's a compelling story, and a scary one.
There's a lot of interesting ideas here about the banality of suburban and family life, masculinity, the tension between the spreading suburban world and the "uncharted," and the fateful meeting between city slickers (all but Drew were dismissive of the locals) and the indigenous people (not all of which, surprisingly, were presented as "backwards," although enough cliches persist to make me uneasy).
The issue, too, of male-on-male sexual assault is interesting, especially the shame/inability to ever admit what happened, which largely drives the group's decisions. So rarely do I find that sexual assaults in fiction serve a purpose other than to brutalize characters and shock readers. This was a welcome exception--and handled better than the "squeal" line in the movie, which was ad-libbed.
Over-all, the book is a bit slow and hasn't aged well in many ways (a slur is used on the last page, as just one example), but it's a compelling story, and a scary one.