Michael Crummey's latest novel, The Adversary, opens with a grim note of contagion: 'There was a killing sickness on the shore that winter and the only services at the church were funerals.' This sets the tone for a book that plumbs the depths of depravity but, thanks to its energy and adventurous language, never loses a black sense of humour. The novel recently won the 30th annual Dublin Literary Award, worth €100,000, marking growing recognition for Crummey beyond his native Canada.
Crummey, who hails from Newfoundland, sets all six of his novels there, capturing the power of the lashing sea and scouring wind. The Adversary is set in the town of Mockbeggar, where a wedding between a trembling girl, Anna Morels, and the brutal tyrant Abe Strapp is interrupted by an impediment: another girl, Imogen Purchase, is revealed to have been impregnated by Strapp. Neither girl's fate is enviable, and Crummey's work disabuses readers of any romantic notions about life in a wild, isolated place in centuries past.
The true mechanism of the book is the rivalry between Strapp and the Widow Caines, a woman who dresses in her late husband's clothes to run her business. Like Crummey's previous novel The Innocents, The Adversary plays on a biblical story—this time, Cain and Abel. The novel also features a kind of trinity in three young people named Solemn, Bride, and Lazarus, who represent a leavening element of goodness.
The novel's blurb compares it to the HBO series Deadwood, an apt analogy for its portrait of a society forged under duress. Crummey luxuriates in vivid swearing and slang, drawing on Francis Grose's 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. The Widow Caines dismisses a skirt as a 'fucksail', and the madam of the whorehouse, known as the Abbess, uses colourful terms for sexual acts. Crummey is a wise and unsparing writer who retains empathy even for his blackest creations, and the bloody denouement of The Adversary is well earned.
