by James Dickey

"Here we go," he said, "out of the sleep of the mild people into the wild rippling water."

Once in a while you come across a story that grabs you and doesn’t let go until it’s told, Deliverance is one of those stories.

This story is about a journey and like all good journeys it is about much more then moving through space and time. It’s about a journey from one state of being to another, it‘s a story about a deep spiritual journey; about facing yourself in a moment of survival, about looking deep inside yourself to who you are and finally it’s about how such a journey changes us.

On the surface this is a good old fashioned adventure story. The setting is the Georgia (USA) wilderness, where four men from the city are going to spend a weekend traveling down a remote white-water river. Everything is going well until the second day of the trip when the men suffer from a brutal and horrific attack. The attack turns their trip into a struggle for survival as one man becomes a human hunter who is offered his own harrowing deliverance.

The narrator of the story, a middle aged man named Ed, spends the first chapter debating the wisdom of taking such a trip. The driving force behind the trip is his friend Lewis, who is an outdoorsman, obsessed with a desire to pit himself against nature and a natural leader. Ed lets Lewis convince him to go, and is happy that his confident friend is in charge. He’s plagued by doubts that almost every traveler knows. He’s both excited and scared to be leaving behind all the comforts of home, he’s glad to be with his friends but he misses his wife, he’s glad to be on the road but maybe he would rather be sleeping in his own bed.

As the pace of the story quickens, Ed is forced take on a different role from the amiable follower, he is called to step forward and to ask deeper and deeper questions of himself; questions that we only confront in moments of deep crisis and survival. We travel with him as he passes through these moments to the point of knowing what is done is done. Who would we be without these moments? As Dickey writes, ‘here we go, out of the sleep of mild people…’

The best books take you down roads you’ve never been down. In the process they expand your understanding of what is possible and what you are capable of. Dickey’s book helps us glimpse such understandings and is a great story at the same time. The writing in this book is beautiful, poetic and wild. The descriptions of the river and our relationship to nature are captured in sentences that are waste no words.

Read this book.

From the book:

"A slow force took a hold of us; the bank began to go backwards. I felt the complicated urgency of the current, like a thing made of many threads being pulled, and with this came the feeling I always had at the moment of losing consciousness at night, going towards something unknown that I could not avoid, but from which I would return. I dipped the paddle in."

"In the beginning it was very wild and quiet. I remembered to be frightened and right away I was. It was the beautiful impersonality of the place that struck me the hardest; I would not have believed that it could hit me all at once like this, or with such force. The silence and the silence-sound of the river had nothing to do with any of us. It had nothing to do with the town we had just left, with its few street lights in the mountain darkness, its cafes and the faces of the farmers in the tired glow of rigged wires in the town square, and the one theatre showing a film that was appearing on late television in the city."

• Reviewed by Zaid Hassan

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