Journey into Self

DELIVERANCE by James Dickey. 278 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $5.95.

James Dickey's four characters seem far from ready for challenge or response. One is a quiet sales supervisor for a soft-drink company who not only believes in his company's product but in its advertising. Another sells mutual funds. Dickey's narrator, Ed Gentry, runs a Southern graphics studio cheerfully described as a "no-sweat shop." Just occasionally he is nudged by a fear of encroaching flab and a feeling that he is sliding too easily through life. Of them all, only Lewis Medlock seems outward-bound for the heart of darkness. At 38, he is an expert archer, spelunker, weight lifter and fiend for physical fitness; he is also an obsessive and philosophic seeker of challenges. He presses the others to join him on a three-day canoe trip down a north Georgia mountain gorge.

"I think the machines are going to fail," Medlock explains, "the political systems are going to fail and a few men are going to take to the hills and start over." Survival, he points out, depends "on having to survive. The kind of life I'm talking about depends on its being the last chance. The very last of all . . ."

Primitive Struggle. That kind of chatter, as anyone's twelve-year-old adventure-story reader could tell, can only lead to trouble. Half the fun of reading Deliverance is watching an expert poet-turned-first-novelist deliver his creations into the hands of fate and fast water.

The 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. The final score: two mountain folk dead (by arrow shot), one canoer dead (from ambush rifle fire), three bodies secretly and horribly buried or sunk to avoid trouble with the police.

A 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.

Up to a 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.

Brief but Crucial. Part of the book's impact comes from a poetic empathy that the author feels for the objects and forces that 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 not a part of a compelling story but a self-conscious exercise.

Happily, the lapse is short. Dickey's narrative, like the inexorable river, soon reasserts itself, rolling the reader and Dickey's survivors back to their own comfy suburban world.

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