The Adversary by Michael Crummey

I carried a copy of Michael Crummey’s most recent novel The Adversary to Newfoundland with me this fall. I wanted to read it near the location where I thought it was set, the Mockbeggar Plantation, now part of the town of Bonavista on the tip of the Bonavista Peninsula. Only after reading The Adversary, did I learn that Michael Crummey simply used the name and made the place, as we come to know it, out of his own imagination.

This is a novel full of many characters who seem unbelievable, but the author writes in his acknowledgements of “looting and pilfering” from a variety of historical sources. And, I have heard him say when asked about a particularly strange scene in an earlier novel that it was something he was told as having actually happened.

I always learn something about language when I read a book by Michael Crummey and this one is no exception. He also admits to “shameless pillaging” from a volume titled A Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. Vulgar meaning the language of thieves and prostitutes, much of it shocking to read.

The Adversary is a companion piece to Michael Crummey’s The Innocents, taking place in a community along an isolated shoreline. We meet a very different pair of siblings, Abe Strapp and the Widow Caines, the adult children of a local Merchant. These two hate each other – always have and always will. Abe Strapp is a despicable man, there is not one bit of goodness or kindness in him. He and his sister are certainly adversaries, and for some time I thought she was the more human of the two – that he was the devil. But, in the end, they are each as cruel as the other.

There are also characters whose welfare we care about. Some among the Society of Friends, the Quakers, who have many members in the community. There are young people, some who have come as indentured servants, who want only to live in peace ad make a life for themselves and their families. As they cross paths with Abe Strapp and the Widow Caines we fear for their well-being.

This is novel is set in a time and place of hardship for its people – few resources, primitive medical care, lack of nutrition, more often than not. Destructive storms on land and sea. Life in an unforgiving landscape with little control over their day to day lives, or their future. There is pack ice delaying the fishing season, and late planting. There are privateers, there are fires, public whippings, amputations, storms – all to be endured. At one point near the end of the novel when yet another brutal scene involves the young people, I thought in anguish “can’t anything nice happen to anyone?” In the end, I felt hopeful that the generations to come after Abe Strapp and the Widow Caines will find a better life – perhaps there will be another novel to follow their future lives – or they will stay within the pages of The Adversary. And therein is the power of fiction – and the wonder of the writing of Michael Crummey. The Adversary – a great novel.