Michael Crummey. The Adversary: A Novel. Doubleday, 2024 [2023]. 322 pp.
It’s prize season again for novel enjoyers, all the dozens of us. This year one title got a surprise win from the Dublin Literary Award: a work of historical fiction called The Adversary by Michael Crummey from Canada. Crummey has published poetry and fiction since the turn of the millennium, all with a regionalist focus on the history and landscapes of Newfoundland.
The Adversary beat out some big favorites on the DLA’s shortlist, like Percival Everett’s James (which everyone had naturally assumed already won the Pulitzer months before it was announced), and it even overcame the home-court advantage of Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song!
Moreover, reviewers raved about the use of archaic Anglo-Irish colonial dialect, terms like gormless or bush-rusher or dirty-puzzle, and idioms like “ass and diddle” or “Jesus loves the little children!” This was shaping up to be a pretty serious-sounding novel after all. Your host decided to find out for himself if Crummey’s prize-winner would live up to the hype, or if it would turn out to be an overall crummy reading experience.
(Get it?)
So, it was quite good, but its subject matter is right up my alley: a historical and maritime novel set in a backward English colony on the north coast of Newfoundland. It’s bleaker and drabber than a suburban home done up in millennial gray. It was compelling to read and I liked the ultimate direction it took, which was frankly into neo-noir territory. Think Light in the Forest meets Death Wish.
It is a plotty novel to be sure. It would make a terrific movie or miniseries; its pacing is ready-made with crisp scenes and dialogue hooks. If this novel had come out in the mid 90s, it would’ve been adapted straight away into a blockbuster with someone like Helen Mirren in the lead, and in the trailer the announcer would say in a gravelly baritone: “When winter comes to Newfoundland…bad business…only darkens the bad blood.”
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