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Completed	11 September 2009
Title	Deliverance
Author	James Dickey
Published	1970
Quote	"The change was not gradual; you could have stopped the car and got out at the exact point where suburbia ended and the red-neck South began. I would like to have done that, to see what the sense of it would be. There was a motel, then a weed field, and then on both sides Clabber Girl came out of hiding, leaping onto the sides of barns, 666 and Black Draught began to swirl, and Jesus began to save. We hummed along, borne with the inverted canoe on a long tide of patent medicines and religious billboards. From such a trip you would think that the South did nothing but dose itself and sing gospel songs; you would think that the bowels of the southerner were forever clamped shut; that he could not open and let natural process flow through him, but needed one purgative after another in order to make it to church."
Review	I loved the language of this book. The topic and setting, not so much, but the language was poetic. There was nothing not to like about the writing. Not surprisingly, the author was a poet first and foremost, and actually, apparently, quite a celebrated one. This was his first and only novel. Published in 1970, on the heels of the Vietnam War, the novel was a quick financial success, followed closely by an equally successful movie starring Burt Reynolds. Do you remember it? I do. I saw the movie as a child, and as I contemplate that fact, I think of how I would never, ever let my little nieces and nephews see such a movie till, say, they're in college. You think I jest? I was glad to see that the movie very closely followed the book, sometimes even verbatim. I like it when it happens like that. I like it when movies stay true to the book. The Deep South setting of the book brought back memories of my own southern exposure, like a bad dream. But the author really captured what I thought was the heart and soul of these backwoods hillbillies, and like it or not, the characters really came to life. This is the story of a couple of guys on a weekend canoe trip gone awry. Here's an excerpt, where the language is particularly beautiful. One of the guys is falling off the cliff, into the raging river below. "The rope broke, and we were gone. Suddenly there was no weight, and nothing to plan for. The plan of the night before saved me though; I got a good kick against the cliff with the foot I had braced there and a knee-shove with the other leg, and this moved me out a few feet from the wall. The rocks were coming, and so was I. When my head came around I could see I was clear, and that was all that mattered, at all. "I had no further control, though. There was an instant of sunny nothing, and of drifting and turning. Where was the river? There was green and blue, in some kind of essential relation, and the river went into my right ear like an ice pick. I yelled, a tremendous, walled-in yell, and then I felt the current thread through me, first through my head from one ear and out the other and then complicatedly through my body, up my rectum and out my mouth and also in at the side where I was hurt. "I realized that I was in something I knew, in the slow unhurried pull of current. Then the water took to the wound, and nearly took it from me. It had been so many years since I had been really hurt that the feeling was almost luxurious, though I knew when I tried to climb the water to the surface that I had been weakened more than I had thought. Unconsciousness went through me. I was in a room of varying shades of green beautifully graduated from light to dark, and I went toward the palest color, though it seemed that this was to one side of me rather than above. An instant before I broke water I saw the sun, liquid and transformed, and then it exploded in my face. "I was hurt in a couple of new ways, especially in the hands, but after trying my arms and legs against the water I knew I was not hurt so badly that I could not function. I lay forward in the current, thinking vaguely of how to swim, and the thought made me move, for I was doing it."

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