‘The Adversary’ is a tale of family ties run amok
Michael Crummey, a poet and one of North America’s finest novelists, has set all six of his novels in his native Newfoundland, most in the 18th and 19th centuries. His conjuring of the rawness, cruelty and precariousness of life during this time is detailed and haunting.
His new novel, “The Adversary,” is, like his previous, “The Innocents” (2019), set on the unforgiving coast of the Labrador Sea in the first half of the 19th century. The earlier book, which is marginally and slyly connected to the present one, tells the story of a young orphaned brother and sister left as sole inhabitants of their late parents’ fishing outpost on an isolated cove. The children survive – barely – chiefly by catching and preserving cod that they exchange for provisions from a fish merchant’s agent, the Beadle, who sails into the cove twice a year aboard the schooner Hope. As the children grow older, the perils of their existence are escalated by the dawn of urgent but unfathomable sexual feelings. Unfathomable, because the children’s knowledge is sketchy, gathered haphazardly from Bible stories and their parents’ chance remarks. They are, in a word, innocents: Adam and Eve in an unabundant Eden.
“The Adversary” occupies the same time frame but in a small harbor town, called Mockbeggar. Its two leading citizens were, until recently, Cornelius Strapp and Elias Caines. Both were fish merchants and ship owners with far-flung fishing outposts. The men had
By Michael Crummey; Doubleday, 336 pages, $29 .......................................................
been upstanding and civic-minded benefactors to the community, but now their businesses have been passed on – to Abe Strapp, Cornelius’ son, and to Elias’ wife, known simply as the Widow Caines. The new owners are, as it happens, brother and sister.
The Widow is ruthless, adept at business strategy, domineering and infinitely devious; Abe is a wastrel and a drunkard, a debauched, swaggering bully with no talent or appetite for running a business. The visceral hatred between the siblings drives the plot into very dark territory. Where the previous novel brought to mind Adam and Eve, here we have Cain and Abel.
After her husband’s death, the Widow cut her hair and donned men’s clothing, a “deviant habit of dress” that scandalizes the entire town – and no one more than Abe’s headman, the Beadle, from the earlier book. A “punctilious, sanctimonious prig,” he views the Widow as an abomination; even her undoubted gift for business is to him “almost an infernal talent.” In his righteous misogyny, the Beadle recoils at her “sulfurous pride and ambition,” feeling at times “it was the Adversary he heard speaking through her, the Dark One’s cunning and subtlety.” He is not alone. Aubrey Picco, once Elias’ headman and now the Widow’s, gazes bleakly out the window after learning she has inherited the business: “There was a broken line of sea ice pinnacled on the near shoreline by wind and tide and looking like the outer wall of an Arctic fortress, glowing against the bay’s dark water. A voice like the voice of the spirit spoke to Aubrey then. The fortress walls are useless, it said. The Adversary is already within.”
The Widow’s is not the only satanic force at large in Mockbeggar. Her brother, Abe, impulsive, unruly and rarely sober, is at the center of a “spiraling accretion of chaos.” He murders a man, sets up a brothel, promotes gambling, fosters drunkenness, provokes a riot, and beats and maims his wife – to mention only a few of his accomplishments. Further, he has connived at becoming the town’s justice of the peace and bases his rulings solely on his own interests and whims. Between Abe and the Widow Caines’ machinations, Mockbeggar has become a theater of enmity, violence and tribulation. To be sure, there are good people here, too, among them three young people whose stories we also follow; but what is wholesome and decent has little chance of survival in this decidedly postlapsarian world.
Torn apart by these two warring siblings, the town may be doomed to disappear, as so many human endeavors and cultures already have. While digging a drain, workmen discover and open an ancient coffin, revealing to the townspeople’s wondering eyes the body of a man in Puritan garb, a relic of an extinct way and understanding of life. The corpse, clasping a Bible, is wearing a ring engraved with a winged skull and the words “Death Conquers All.” Where another person might consider the inscription a reminder of an unhappy truth, the Widow finds something quite … different.
“The Adversary” is a beautifully written, immensely powerful and subtly ingenious novel. Its greatest – which is to say, most monstrous – revelations are so discreetly offered that you could miss them; but when you realize them, they practically take your breath away. They did mine. And when I turned the last page, I just sat there, utterly stunned by this novel’s terrible force.