The Adversary by Michael Crummey

There is no one out there who can write a novel about a Newfoundland outport like Michael Crummey. Always desolate, always grim, but every novel is different. The Adversary, his latest, takes place on the coast of Newfoundland, sometime in the seafaring past, and focuses on the relationships and corruption of the people in the settlement of Mockbeggar, a collection of people who are focused on the Atlantic cod fishery and eking out an existence in the harsh climate of Newfoundland. Left to their own world, this is a novel brimming with secrets, revenge, and a family feud bringing everyone in the community to odds with one another.

“This is a novel brimming with secrets, revenge, and a family feud bringing everyone in the community to odds with one another.”

Crummey starts his novel with an electric scene: a fourteen-year-old girl is set to marry a major merchant in the area, when a widow (and secretly? Or at least forgotten) and the merchant’s sister, throws gasoline on the whole affair: she arrives at the church with a pregnant servant in tow, and accuses her brother of having slept with the servant, who is now five months pregnant. The fourteen-year-old girl exits stage right, and so begins years of jostling for position in the community, shifting alliances, and violence.

The Adversary is a bleak novel, but one rich with experience. Crummey does not focus too tightly on the plot – rather, the novel is focused on the fullness of life in the community, and the viewpoint shifts between characters, people float in and out of the story, and the result is a slice of life, making me more sympathetic to each character and their situation. All of them are complex, with a myriad of motives and viewpoints on the conflict in their community. If cozy community stories aren’t doing it for you and you want a more fraught tracking of a community over a significant period, The Adversary is for you.

In reading this novel, I was struck repeatedly by the idea of playing the long game. The people of Mockbeggar are not out to score cheap shots at one another – they happen, but the most pivotal moments in the novel arise out of long-simmering hatred and desire for vengeance. From grudges birthed years before. This is a messy, violent novel, and yet it still gets at the root of communities which exist today. We are bound by something (society, survival), and yet we let our hostilities poison them. The Adversary peels back these tendencies, giving us a bird’s eye view of a community bound by the fishery and survival. I can’t say I enjoyed it, exactly, because it’s not a novel for enjoying, but it was an excellent read.

This is a TMR Starred Review!

MICHAEL CRUMMEY is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Little Dogs: New and Selected Poems and Passengers, and the short fiction collection Flesh and Blood. Michael Crummey lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf Canada (Sept. 26 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385685440
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385685443

Alison Manley

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Alison Manley has ricocheted between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia for most of her life. Now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she is the Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at Saint Mary's University. Her past life includes a long stint as a hospital librarian on the banks of the mighty Miramichi River. She has an honours BA in political science and English from St. Francis Xavier University, and a Master of Library and Information Studies from Dalhousie University. While she's adamant that her love of reading has nothing to do with her work, her ability to consume large amounts of information very quickly sure is helpful. She is often identified by her very red lipstick, and lives with her partner Brett and cat, Toasted Marshmallow.