Review of THE ADVERSARY by Michael Crummey (New Release)

 4.5 Stars

I always look forward to a new book from Michael Crummey.  And again I have not been disappointed; this one, like his others, is a compulsive read.

Abe Strapp and Widow Caines are the owners of the largest mercantile firms in the isolated outport of Mockbeggar in northern Newfoundland.  They fight for dominance in the North Atlantic fishery.  They despise each other:  “They each saw in the other the antithesis and obstacle of all they valued and wanted from the world.”  Their machinations end up drawing in everyone into their endless feud because “Abe Strapp and the Widow Caines viewed the world as a glass to their own visage and nothing within their sight was granted a life independent.  Every creature beyond themselves existed only to serve their designs and appetites.” 

At a funeral, the officiant warns that “’Strife . . . begets strife.  In the death of this innocent, God implores us to lay aside wrath and malice and revenge and to put on the bowels of compassion one toward another.  Otherwise we are lost.’”  From the beginning it is obvious that neither of the two is able to take this advice so tragedy is certain to follow.  It is just a matter of time so as I read I found myself dreading what would happen to more innocents. 

Though Abe and the Widow are enemies, they are equally unlikeable and very similar.  Abe is a truly vile man; some of his actions left me stunned in horror.  Even his father recognizes his son’s “pernicious appetites, his vanity, his incurious scorn.”  He never takes responsibility for his actions, instead spending his time listing “many grievances . . . and the larger forces at work in the world to keep him from the heights he felt himself heir to.”  He is very proud and his pride is easily injured; when it is, he will take revenge.  Whether a person is guilty or innocent matters not.  He has a “relish for the world’s puerile and transient pleasures.”  In the course of the novel, he is shown guilty of all the seven deadly sins:  pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. 

Widow Caines is more subtle, “quicksilver and inscrutable, impossible to pin down and herd.” One man describes her as possessing “the Dark One’s cunning and subtlety.”  She wears her father’s suit whenever in public and she is described as possessing a “masculine arrogance”; people believe “something essential to a woman’s station was lacking in her.”  She states, however, that she doesn’t want to be like a man; she just wishes she had their choices and options not available to her as a woman:  she has “a disgust for the circumstances she was born into, for the cockeyed rules that governed the world’s standards and proceedings and transactions, setting one thing over another against all sensible measure.”  She, like Abe, is consumed with getting what she wants regardless of the consequences to anyone else:  “A curt, self-satisfied dismissal of everything but her own way in the world, a willingness to follow that light into whatever darkness might come to meet it.”  She is a consummate manipulator, taking advantage of people:  “It was his goodness she’d been drawn to from the beginning, his incorruptible decency.  His loneliness.  Things she felt she might some day leverage to her own ends.” 

Three times, the Widow is described as someone who would eat her own children.  By the end of the book, I was convinced of this assertion.  The same would apply to Abe.  The book blurb states that the novel is about “the corruption of power and the power of corruption.”  That is indeed a focus.  So many good people suffer because of the actions of those in power.  My sympathy was for those who are unwitting pawns used in the power games played by Abe and the Widow and their enablers, enablers who are often also in love with power and are corrupted by it.   

This book captured my attention from the beginning and never lost it.  Storms, disease, and hunger plague the residents of Mockbeggar.  There is danger also from marauding privateers.  And then there is the suspense about what the merciless adversaries will do next and who will suffer as a consequence.  There are some surprise twists, but what is not a shock is that the good and innocent are the ones most affected.  (Readers of Crummey’s novel The Innocents will recognize the references to the Best orphans.)

There is so much to dissect in this novel; for instance, an entire essay could be written about the author’s word choices.  This is a book that will definitely go on my To Re-Read pile!

Note:  I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.