THE ADVERSARY, by Michael Crummey. Read by Mary Lewis.
There’s something gloriously grim about Michael Crummey’s novels. While they vary in tone, their settings are mostly small Newfoundland settlements bedeviled by deprivation, exploitation, storms and disease. The splendor comes from Crummey’s canny doling out of plot turns and character twists, and from his language — a mix of Newfoundland peculiarities, scriptural quotations and Anglo-Saxon swearing. “God’s reeving nails” is one favored oath. Also, “Piss and corruption!”
In “The Adversary,” a fearsome rivalry rages between two grown siblings in Mockbeggar, a fictional early-19th-century harbor town. Abe Strapp and his sister, known as the Widow Caines, compete in the shipping trade — and, it seems, over who can be the worst person in “the backwoods of a backward colony.” With different levels of malice, they set terrible events in motion.
As with Crummey’s previous book, “The Innocents,” Mary Lewis skillfully handles both narration and dialogue. Adopting a neutral tone in setting scenes, she voices the full cast of characters distinctively and convincingly. One recurring highlight is Abraham Clinch, an enabler of Strapp’s wickedness, whose unfortunate mouth (“a full set of ivories on the left, the gums on the opposite side boasting not a single tooth”) would pose a challenge to lesser narrators.
At one point the Widow seems to seek sympathy from Clinch: “My brother kills everything he touches. … My mother being the first of those.” Clinch responds, “You have survived him so far,” a note of regret in his whistly, lopsided croak. As ever, there’s more corruption than compassion in Crummey’s aptly named Mockbeggar.
THE ADVERSARY | By Michael Crummey | Read by Mary Lewis | Random House Audio | 11 hours, 3 minutes
