I was recommended The Adversary by Phil of Wardini Books who knows what I like and what might challenge me. I’ll tell this one in her words: “It’s miserable. Absolutely. It’s so dark and violent and they all lead such horrible lives and it’s historical and there are old ships and pirates and oooh, I read it and thought of you straight away.” Is this how she sees me? I mean, I love Catherine Robertson, too, and not a shipwreck in sight. But I’ve read and been inspired by many books on Phil’s recommendation, so off I went with The Adversary under my arm. Good God.
She was absolutely right about the misery. 19th-century Newfoundland was no place for sissies. There is no let up, life in this story is unrelentingly horrible for everyone, all the way through. The climate is freezing, there are famines and plagues and whippings and deaths and corruption and murders and raping and pillaging and torture and slavery and brothels and abused children and the worst of it all are the people, especially those in power, who unfailingly are malicious and cruel to each other, the brother and sister main characters getting darker and darker and more twisted as the book goes on.
Thing is, Michael Crummey writes all this grim in language tinged with the historic Newfie cant. He draws you in with enough of the quaintness to make you at home with these people, the sort of place where a woman would have been better “born with a plug tail rather than a woman’s commodity” (ha!) and the town is called Mockbeggar. Believe me when I say that’s a place you do not want to visit when time-travelling.
This is Crummey’s locale though, a geography and climate that is his world, a history and a language and a way of life that he has studied. He renders it all with horrible intimacy and with a way of telling that drags you in and rubs your face in the muck. What do you do when someone is a brilliant storyteller, but tells a story about exceptional brutality in a time and a place where such things were not exceptional but just day-to-day life? How did I feel after finishing this book? Actually, physically sick.
Dark and brutal and entirely fictional I can’t stand, where an author imagines the extremes of evil for a reader’s entertainment, for the ‘shock factor’ that sells books. Dark and brutal and true is another thing all together, though closely linked. I think the ethics of writing brutality come down to the author’s motive. We do need to own our histories, and fiction can get under the skin of history like nothing else.
Phil has the advantage on me on this point. The copy of the book she lent me has been signed for her by Crummey. She was at the International Literature Festival of Dublin earlier this year, heard him speak and was smitten. He, apparently, is a lovely bloke and nothing like his characters. I kind of wish he’d put just one powerful character in his story I could admire, but, damn it, he’s probably writing too close to the wind of truth for that.
The Adversity won the Dublin Literary Award, one of the richest literary prizes in the world. Not just me and Phil, then, who find it utterly deep, troubling and compelling.
Just goes to show, if you’re looking for book recommendations, find a bookseller on your wavelength, go with the challenges and life will never be dull.
Cristina Sanders' blog 