The Black Hole of Sin

The Adversary
by michael crummey
harper, 336 pages, $21.79

Michael Crummey introduces his 2023 novel, The Adversary, with two epigrams. The first is an official NASA description of a black hole: “Although a black hole does not emit light, matter falling toward it collects in a hot, glowing accretion disk that astronomers can detect.” The black hole of the novel is the rivalry between Abe Strapp and the Widow Caines, the two children of Cornelius Strapp, a shipping magnate in the village of Mockbeggar, Newfoundland, sometime near the beginning of the nineteenth century. 

Knowing his son’s “pernicious appetites, his vanity, his incurious scorn” and that vindictiveness is Abe’s only “spur to action,” Cornelius leaves his business in trust with the Beadle, Abraham Clinch, Mockbeggar’s leading Anglican official, until Abe should marry, a condition his father hopes will lend “ballast to the keel.” The eccentric Widow, a Quaker, inherits the worldly possessions of her deceased husband, Elias Caines—house, warehouse, six schooners, Caines Mercantile, livestock. Instead of widow’s black, she goes about town dressed like a dandy in “dragon-green jacket and striped waistcoat and men’s breeches and her husband’s brimmed hat.” Pet jays dart through her office.

Abe and the Widow own the two largest fishing concerns in Mockbeggar, and Abe serves as Justice of the Peace. Their lives touch everyone, as does their lifelong hatred.

rnAs children, the bookish, business-minded Widow was assigned to tutor her headstrong, indulged younger brother, but the tutoring usually descended into battles both verbal and physical: “Each day was a contest of wills that descended into physical confrontations, the sister holding the upper hand at first by dint of her size, despite Abe’s fondness for kicking, for using his nails and teeth. He would pinch her tender breasts between a thumb and forefinger and hold for dear life as she beat him across the head and shoulders.” Eventually, Abe becomes the stronger and “regularly left his tutor with bruises on her arms and legs and breasts, with blackened eyes,” until their father calls a halt “to avoid permanent injury to one or the other.”

Abe’s wickedness is obvious to all: Brutish, unrestrained, lustful, privileged, accompanied everywhere by two stupid thugs, Matterface and Heater. He opens a brothel in his home to service sailors who drop anchor at Mockbeggar. Once he gets a taste of authority, 

He was like a creature kept in a cage who discovers the door unlocked. He charged around in a roil, rolling in whatever shit he found lying on the paths. He doubled the fees on alehouses and grog shops and he shuttered establishments who refused to pay it. He sold himself a license and opened a tavern in the Big House, selling alcohol and confiscated from the shops he’d closed down.

The Widow is unnaturally disciplined and calm by comparison, but to the Beadle she’s the worse of the two siblings. Parading her “sulphurous pride and ambition . . . like an animal on a leash,” she was “quicksilver and inscrutable, impossible to pin down or herd.” During their conversations, the Beadle imagines “it was the Adversary he heard speaking through her, the Dark One’s cunning and subtlety.”

As Crummey illustrates, such a titanic pass and fell between two mighty opposites is deadly for the “baser natures” that get stuck in between. And everyone in Mockbeggar is between Abe and the Widow, both of whom cajole, manipulate, threaten, and seduce to draw others into their game. Abe poisons relations with crude sexual innuendo, by sending Matterface and Hatter to do his dirty work, or by enforcing village law through the Beadle. The Widow’s lie leads indirectly to several deaths. There are a few moments of reprieve, but these moments of peace are filled with foreboding. We know they’ll all get sucked in, and they do.

So much for the omnivorous black hole. The second epigram at the start of the book comes from Proverbs: “But they lie in wait for their own blood, they ambush their own lives.” As Abe and the Widow pull the rest of the town into their lightless void, they stumble steadily toward their own demise. We know from the first page that they’ll get theirs, but, while there’s a degree of poetic satisfaction in watching Crummey’s characters ambush their own lives, they leave so much carnage in their wake that satisfaction gives way to the terrible, cathartic terror and sadness Aristotle said tragedy should evoke. Many dark novels achieve a symmetrical happily-ever-after justice that’s more comic than tragic. Not The Adversary. It is tragedy in a Shakespearean register—not a Sophoclean catastrophe of misjudgment and error, but one where trickles of sinful ambition, cruelty, and selfishness grow into a titanic torrent that swallows everything in its path. 

The Adversary is written in prose as craggy and windswept as the forbidding Newfoundland landscape, peppered with nineteenth-century vulgarities (“shag-bag,” “grubshite,” “malkintrash”) and arresting phrasings (e.g., Abe “had the bedizened look of a child dressed by a senile grandmother”). Mockbeggar is populated by vivid characters—Quakers who speak Bible-eze, American privateers before whom Abe cowers, the reclusive local midwife, herbalist, and abortionist Mary Oram, the dignified English Captain Truss who is disgusted by Abe’s shamelessness. Crummey’s surprising, well-paced narrative seduces us into watching even when we want to look away. The novel isn’t pleasant, but it’s breathtaking.

Peter J. Leithart is president of Theopolis Institute. 

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Image by Théodore Rousseau, provided by Ablakok, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.