The Adversary, by Michael Crummey
The Adversary is not a sequel, but a companion volume, to Crummey’s The Innocents. The titular innocents in the earlier novel, an orphaned brother and sister, have to decide whether to move from their isolated home to the nearest community of Mockbeggar; this novel takes place in Mockbeggar during the same time period. (“Mockbeggar” is a fictional town, but in trying to place it in the geography and history of Newfoundland it might not hurt to remember that there was a real fishing plantation called Mockbeggar, now a national historical site, in the town of Bonavista).
I’ve heard Michael Crummey read from this book twice, and talk about the fact that if The Innocents is an Adam-and-Eve type of story, The Innocents is the matching Cain-and-Abel story. Once again we have two siblings, a brother and a sister, but instead of being bound by love and fidelity as the children in The Innocents are, Abe Strapp and his sister, whose first name we never learn (she becomes known as “The Widow Caines” later in life, and this is how she is referred to throughout the book) loathe each other from childhood. When they grow up to control the two powerful merchant firms in Mockbeggar — Abe through inheritance and The Widow through marriage — their personal enmity becomes amplified to the point where the town is torn apart by their feuding.
It’s common, in historical fiction set in outport Newfoundland (and I would put some of my own work in this category) to balance the harshness of the external environment — weather, shipwreck, disease — with the warmth of human community: while many novels portray difficult and tangled human relationships, there is usually an underlying theme of people who will pull together and support one another through the hard times. What makes The Adversary so stark and unyielding in its portrayal of the past is the absence of that warmth and support. While there are good people in Mockbeggar, the cruelty and hate between its most powerful people permeates everything, making this not just a powerful historical but a sobering and timeless reflection on what happens when evil is given power.
