“God alone ordains the state of things,” he said.
The Widow shook her head. “O fools learn sense,” she said.
The Beadle flinched at those words, at the feculent gall of the woman to speak down to him with scripture. He said, “An adversary there shall be even round about the land. And he shall bring down thy strength from thee, and thy palaces shall be spoiled.”
“The Book of Amos?” the Widow asked and he nodded. “Am I the adversary, Mr. Clinch? Or would that be you?”
“We shall have to wait and see,” he said.
Set in the same timeframe (late eighteenth-century) and along the same stretch of Newfoundland’s northern coast as The Innocents (the Best siblings from that novel are referenced a few times here), The Adversary trains its focus onto those few who knew wealth and power in the isolated fishing port of Mockbeggar (to wit: we immediately meet the Mr. Strapp to whom the Best orphans were indebted). With a struggle for dominance at play between two rival operations — and with gender, class, and race imposing their own pressures — this gritty historical fiction is really the story of how the whims, egotism, and greed of those at the top translates into helpless misery for the working class. Plus ça change. Once again, Michael Crummey has brought breathing life into his characters and setting — with the sensibilities of a poet, his word choices are always evocative without being florid — and while his powerseekers are thoroughly unlikeable, it’s the little people caught in the crossfire that give the reader someone to root for. I was absolutely captivated by the storytelling here — from the sentences to the overall story arc — and I loved the whole thing. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
In the days after the killing, several men took young Solemn Lambe aside to advise him against doing anything rash to avenge Dallen’s death. Abe Strapp was best left to God’s judgement, they said. Solemn was not quite twelve and the notion of God’s judgement was too hypothetical to offer comfort. You won’t be helping anyone if you winds up dead like your father, people insisted. As if they wanted to make the boy complicit in their own infuriating helplessness.
“Infuriating helplessness” is the abiding atmosphere in Mockbeggar: Left to the whims of climate, disease, unreliable cod stocks, and marauding privateers, those trying to eke out a living on this fogbound stretch of rock can hardly keep their families fed at the best of times. Layer on the companies who hold everyone in debt — with the power of the Church and State backing their interests — and it’s a wonder anyone survived this life at all. But it’s in the small moments of resistance — the love between youngsters and newfound friends, the Quakers who refuse to meet violence with violence, the outsiders unafraid to stand up to petty tyranny — that grace may be found. Even so: the innocents may find themselves but pawns in the inscrutable games of their local gods.
She lifted her head to look away from that feeling and caught sight of the mirror above the fireplace, the shattered glass reflecting her back in slivers that almost adhered, the figure there riven and distorted and still undeniably herself. It made her think her instincts had been right all along — the world agitated against coherence, against concord, and the truest portrait a person could manage was fragmentary, incomplete.
I’ve tried to avoid spoilers with the overall plot (which was compelling and surprising), but I have to say that it was in the details that Crummey most engaged me: the disinterment of the Pilgrim, the horrific game of “mumble the sparrow”, the impenetrable slang of the ark ruffians; rough scenes told in the voice of a poet go down smoothly. And I want to end by noting that I was delighted to make the connection between The Adversary and The Innocents and would happily read anything else Crummey wants to set in this world.
