Several years have passed since Michael Crummey’s last novel The Innocents was published in the UK in 2020. A pandemic has since occurred and, appropriately perhaps, The Adversary begins on a dark note of contagion. “There was a killing sickness on the shore that winter and the only services at the church were funerals,” runs the opening line, setting the tone for a book that plumbs the depths of depravity but – thanks to its energy, and its ripe and adventurous language – never loses a black sense of humour. Having now won the 30th annual Dublin Literary award, worth €100,000, The Adversary is proof that Crummey is beginning to garner the accolades he deserves beyond his native Canada.
Crummey hails from Newfoundland; all six of his novels are set there. He understands the power of lashing sea, scouring wind, an eked-out existence far from what many consider to be civilisation. In The Innocents he told a kind of Adam-and-Eve story of two children left alone to raise themselves in a shack in the early years of the 19th century. Supplies are occasionally brought in a ship called the Hope; its black-clad captain is known as the Beadle.
