Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

Deliverance, James Dickey (1970)

Now let’s you just drop them pants.

Alright, that’s not the first line, but it’s the one everyone knows, made famous by the film version. Indeed, that film is so well known it seems to have rather obscured the book, which is a shame, as it’s really a great piece of Hemingwayish, boys-own-adventure kind of writing.

Dickey, a poet, brings an exquisite sensibility to his story of four guys on a wilderness canoeing trip who have to fight for their lives after tangling with some horny hillbillies. The narrator seems half in love with Lewis, the survivalist who’s leading the expedition, but he has to take over when Lewis is injured, and it becomes a macho tale of city man discovering his hunter-killer side.

It’s all kept brilliantly simple – the whole thing takes place in a couple of days and there are only a dozen or so scenes. There’s something of ‘Heart of Darkness’ about it – both in subject – a river trip into the wilderness – and style – everything is described with hallucinatory clarity; a personal favourite is a passage on the narrator’s thoughts as he lays in ambush with a bow and arrow that goes on for ten pages.

I guess it isn’t very noir, but I would contend that it is certainly crime, and one of the lost classics of the genre. Shame Dickey didn’t write anything else that comes close to its freakish brilliance; after it, he got waylaid by poetry and booze.

The Vanishing, Tim Krabbe (1984)

Steady as spaceships, the cabins full of tourists moved south over the long, broad road.

The Vanishing is a short sharp shock of a novel with a nightmarish ending. Rex Hofman is on holiday with his fiance Saskia, when she simply disappears. He can’t understand it, and years later he’s still restlessly looking for her – then a man called Lemorne calls, claiming to be her abductor. He offers a Faustian pact – you’ll find out what happened to her if you let me you do the same thing to you…

It’s very simple, split basically into four parts – the vanishing, Rex years later, a flashback that shows you Lemorne’s life up till he kidnapped Saskia, then what happens when the two men meet.

This is a gothic tragedy, full of twisted psychology, but it all seems horribly credible, and banal details are built up to make the horror seem real – great, for example, that Saskia disappears at the most mundane location, a petrol station.

And that ending still gives me shivers. Best not leave it in the bedroom – one of those books to keep in the fridge. And if you’re going to watch the film version, seek out the Dutch one from the 80s, not the terrible Hollywood remake.