Michael Crummey explores the coast of Newfoundland once more in his latest novel The Adversary (Doubleday) which is organized as a series of tit-for-tat acts between two rivals, Abe Strapp and the Widow Caines. As with The Innocents, Crummey’s previous novel, The Adversary appears to be grounded in historic fact. But while The Innocents focussed on the hardships endured by two orphaned siblings—a brother and a sister—in a remote cove in Newfoundland, The Adversary, set in the nineteenth century, has a whole townscape, the outport of Mockbeggar, to explore. Mockbeggar is offered as a sort of model town, illustrating just how bleak rural life had been on “the Rock.” Passages of matter-of-fact carnage are reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, but the blows the residents face land awkwardly at times. My speculation is that Crummey was so committed to realizing the grim logistics of outport life in The Innocents that he had little interest left in helping the reader properly gauge the stakes in Mockbeggar. The town seems to float through the pages without gravity. The Adversary is still a pleasure to read, if only to admire Crummey’s particular way of stringing sentences together—often using words “pillaged” from the Dictionary of Newfoundland English.

—Anson Ching

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