The Adversary by Michael Crummey review – dark humour and depravity at the edge of the Earth

The Guardian

2 days ago

Several years have passed since Michael Crummey's last novel The Innocents was published in the UK in 2020. A pandemic has since occurred and, appropriately perhaps, The Adversary begins on a dark note of contagion. 'There was a killing sickness on the shore that winter and the only services at the church were funerals,' runs the opening line, setting the tone for a book that plumbs the depths of depravity but – thanks to its energy, and its ripe and adventurous language – never loses a black sense of humour. Having now won the 30th annual Dublin Literary award, worth €100,000, The Adversary is proof that Crummey is beginning to garner the accolades he deserves beyond his native Canada.
Crummey hails from Newfoundland; all six of his novels are set there. He understands the power of lashing sea, scouring wind, an eked-out existence far from what many consider to be civilisation. In The Innocents he told a kind of Adam-and-Eve story of two children left alone to raise themselves in a shack in the early years of the 19th century. Supplies are occasionally brought in a ship called the Hope; its black-clad captain is known as the Beadle.
There is no need to read The Innocents to enjoy The Adversary, but it's a pleasure to spot the connection. The new novel is set in a town called Mockbeggar, and the Beadle is one of its itinerant grandees. This is the Canadian frontier, the harried edge of wilderness, though in comparison with the world of The Innocents the municipality's physical comforts seem positively Parisian.
Despite the prevalence of funerals, the reader encounters a wedding in the novel's opening pages. It is between a trembling girl, Anna Morels, brought over from far-off Jersey, and Abe Strapp, one of the grandees of Mockbeggar, the two syllables of his name landing like blows. 'He was a fright for a child to look upon as a prospective husband, bacon-faced, with a small full mouth that gave him the air of a greedy infant.' He turns out to be worse than a greedy infant – Strapp is a brutal tyrant whose violent whims are the scourge of Mockbeggar.
The marriage will not, in fact, take place: as in a gothic tale, an impediment is presented when another girl, Imogen Purchase, is revealed to have been impregnated by Strapp – or at least such testimony is given – and she becomes his forlorn bride. Neither girl's fate is enviable. If you ever entertained romantic ideas of what it might be like to live in a wild and isolated place in centuries past, Crummey's work will disabuse you of such idle fancy.
The book's true mechanism, however, is the rivalry between Strapp and a woman we first meet as the Widow Caines. I am not the first critic to note that, like The Innocents, The Adversary plays on another story in Genesis, that of Cain and Abel; later in the book we find a kind of trinity, too, in the three young people who are the leavening element of goodness and go by the resonant names of Solemn, Bride and Lazarus.
The novel's blurb compares it to Deadwood, David Milch's brilliant HBO series from the early 00s. It is an apt analogy, and not only because both present a portrait of a society forged under duress. Plot doesn't, strictly speaking, drive the tale. Rather, Crummey and Milch alike have built nuanced portraits of the allegiances that must be forged in adversity, and the enmities that arrive not only from longstanding hatreds but from scarce resources too.
And, like Milch, Crummey luxuriates in vivid swearing and slang. The Widow Caines dresses in her late husband's clothes to run her business – she dismisses a skirt as a 'fucksail'. The madam of the whorehouse, known as the Abbess, refers to the use to which the servant's room in her domicile has been put: ''The blanket hornpipe,' she said. 'The goat's jig. Clicket. Making feet for children's stockings.'' In his acknowledgments the author bows to the 1811 edition of Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, now freely available online for all to peruse. You won't be sorry if you do.
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Crummey is a wise and unsparing writer whose understanding of human foibles retains a scrap of empathy even for his blackest creations. The bloody denouement of The Adversary is well earned. The title, if we think along biblical lines, refers to the devil, but Crummey shows that the Adversary is in all of us, just waiting – alas – to be released.
The Adversary by Michael Crummey is published by Serpent's Tail (£9.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.