Deliverance by James Dickey
The whole land was very tense.
An appropriate first sentence for a very tense book.
James Dickey builds up the tension again and again throughout the story. You look for relief around the next bend of the river, only to find a surprising white-water-rapid of a plot turn. Without giving away the ending, the tension doesn't even really end there. It instead fades just a bit, leaving you wondering whether the middle-aged men out to find excitement will ever truly find relief.
With his meticulous attention to descriptions and details, Dickey brings the rural Georgia landscape clearly into focus (quotes below). And that setting is, of course, integral to the plot.
Four good ol' boys who live in the city (Atlanta, I assume, but it's never specific) decide to try and get back to nature--to really live again. They're all having a small-scale mid-life crisis, and, by the end, they're all wishing they had just bought a convertible or got a tattoo instead of trying to tackle the North Georgia woods.
As a side note, I found it interesting that Dickey seems to culturally differentiate between the four main characters and the ones they encounter in the woods. For instance, they're all Southern, probably all have Southern accents. However, the speech of many of the rural residents is written phonetically, and you can really hear their dialects.
Also, the main characters drink beer, hunt, fish and run around a little--in my experience, the classic definition of a good ol' boy. Yet, compared to the backwoods hicks, they're supposed to be the sophisticated ones. However, their sophisticated natures and instincts start to crumble when faced with more primitive circumstances.
A few of those cultural issues aside, I loved this book. It's not my normal genre, but I had a hard time putting it down (partly because I was scared to death). His descriptions of the land were so enjoyable to read, and the characters were, for the most part, believable. A great way to start off my summer reading!
Favorite quotes:
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...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...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.
We were going out the far edge of a little town, swinging to the right through the twiggy grayish stuff that is always growing near southern highways. Up ahead the road ran between two hills. Lined up dead center between them was a mountain, high, broad and blue, the color of concentrated woodsmoke. There were others farther back from it, falling back, receding left and right.
There's lots of music; it's practically coming out of the trees. Everybody plays something: the guitar, the banjo, the autoharp, the spoons, the dulcimer...These are good people, Ed. But they're awfully clannish; they're set in their ways. They'll do what they want to do, no matter what. Every family I've ever met up here has at least one relative in the penitentiary. Some of them are in for making liquor or running it, but most of them are in for murder.
Around noon we started up among them [the hills], still on the highway. At an intersection we turned off onto a blacktop state road, and from that onto a badly cracked and weedy concrete highway of the old days...with the old splattered tar centerline wavering onward. From that we turned onto another concrete road that sagged and slewed and holed-out and bumped ahead, not worth maintaining at all...We were among trees now, lots of them...I was surprised at how much color there was in them. I had thought that the pine tree was about the only tree in the state, but that wasn't the case, as I saw. I had no notion what the trees were, but they were beautiful, flaming and turning color almost as I looked at them. They were just beginning to turn, and the flame was not hot yet.
The other side of the river was not dangerous, but the side where we were was becoming more and more terrifying to stand on. A powerful unseen presence seemed to flow and float in on us from three directions--upstream, downstream and inland. Drew was right; he could be anywhere. The trees and leaves were so thick that the eye gave up easily, lost in the useless tangle of plants living out their time in this choked darkness.
