Intro for Michael Crummey and his novel The Adversary.

Annual Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts | Sechelt,  BC. 2025 August

NOTE: I saved this as a blog post as a simple way to not lose it. By necessity, it was brief.

After my first read of The Adversary, it was the cadences of Crummey’s sentences that stayed with me – that and his great strings of curses, often invented by transforming nouns into verbs. The way that he accomplished this put me in mind of Dennis Lee, James Joyce and Shakespeare, all masters of cadence.

Then, in my 2^nd read - after reading Guy Vanderhaeghe's essays, Because Somebody Asked me to: Observations on History, Literature and the Passing Scene - I experienced how The Adversary can help us to arrive at a more deeply felt sense of our own times. 

The characters of Widow Cain and her brother Abe are textbook examples of what we now call The Dark Triad: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy. Metastatic evil, such as that which afflicted the fictional community of Mockbeggar, takes root and flourishes when there is a combination of three things: deep inequality; a validating religious and cultural landscape; and no effective feedback loop to rein it all in, to constrain it.

In The Adversary, Abe Strapp’s ruthlessness combines with his feral unpredictability and his insatiable desire for retribution. Serving as Justice of the Peace gives him the legal cover and clout as he arrests his competitors without legal cause. Because of his government post, he faces no effective social censure in spite of his Strip-Me-Naked booze sales, his gambling, and his prostitution ventures. The Beadle - and this character is key – is his Enabler.

What if we substituted the fishocracy of Newfoundland’s early 1800s for our current experiences of the techno-digital-otocracy? Or what if we compared the impacts of the early 18^th century merchants to those of our current oligarchs? The quality of the light and chill suffered by the defenseless who are doomed to live in the underbellies of such times is equivalent.

Thankfully, the extremities of such realities as experienced in the fictional town of Mockbeggar need not continue to be like that forever and forever. In The Adversary, Crummey has also created the characters of three children, all raised by Quakers, whose lives embody love, loyalty to service, and a sense of shared purpose. A more holy triad. One of them even gets the last line in the novel. I plan to hold on to that.

For more links and reviews see: The Adversary 

ADDED: Here are bits from Vanderhaeghe's book which influenced my second reading of The Adversary 

Because Somebody Asked me to: Observations on History, Literature and the Passing Scene. Guy Vannderhseghe. 2024 Thistledown Press.

Pg	Notes
145	How often do we turn on our television and hear someone say about some grisly event, “You could never have made me believe that this could happen here.” But the novel also explored the phenomenon of evil on the largest stages, evil on a national or international scale, those arena where territorial ambitions run amok, where wars are purposely fomented, where people’s rights are ruthlessly trampled. I waned to show that the perpetrators of evil in the small stage often share the psychology and character of evil that has the greatest scope and consequence. [referring to his novel August in Winter.]
146	History is the record of an encounter between character and circumstance … The encounter between character and circumstance is essentiall a story.” [Quoting the Canadian historian Donald Creighton.]
268	“Many historians continue to treat their ‘facts’ as though they were ‘given’ and refuse to recognize, unlike most scientists, that they are not so much found as constructed by the kinds of questions which the investigator asks of the phenomena before him” [Quote from Hayden White The Burden of History.]
270	Stories are not lived; there is no such thing as a real story. Stories are told or written, not found. And as for the notion of a true story, this is virtually a contradiction in terms. All stories are fictions. Which mean, of course, that they can be true only in a metaphorical sense and in the sense in which a figure of speech can be true. Is this true enough? [From Hayden White The Content of the Form.]
317	[Hilary] Mantel knows that historians and historical novelists edit our pasts, but she also knows that every human being indulges in that editing. Mantel writes, “It is the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writinigs, we rewrite their lives.”