Michael Crummey. The Adversary. Canada: Penguin/Random House, 2023.
On a distant stretch of Newfoundland's coastline, mercantile rivalries surge to epic proportions, centred in the outport of Mockbeggar, late eighteenth century. Two outrageous siblings are determined to best each other in an ongoing, venomous struggle for control of the area's fishing industry. The heir of the late Cornelius Strapp's extensive business interests is a foolish, self-indulgent manboy, allowing Mr. Clinch, aka the Beadle, to manage his firm. Passing the time with drinking, brawling, and fornicating, the young ruffian surrounds himself with ne'er-do-wells and a pack of hunting dogs. On the other hand, Cornelius' clever daughter had a handle on the business from an early age, but she quit when her brother alone inherited. She married Elias Caines, a lesser rival in the industry, and inherited his firm when he died. Taken to wearing impressive masculine clothing, the widow smartly spearheads her growing company. The brother is Abe Strapp; the sister's name is never told, but is referred to as "Widow Caines" throughout.
The Beadle's expansion plans for Strapp are upended when the Widow halts Abe's wedding to the daughter of "the Jerseyman," a smaller fishing competitor—effectively preventing the merger. Abe is furious; the gloves are off. Insults are trivial compared to underhanded schemes and stealthy murders and false rumours. The entire community is troubled by the seesaw balance of power, with the few Quakers trying to find comfort in scripture. Besides Abe's roughshod actions as local magistrate, the locals contend at times with drastic weather conditions, the rise and fall of cod stocks, plundering privateers, and wasting diseases. Near-death from malaria is no deterrent to the Widow's ambition. Abe's brainwave to open a brothel is immensely popular among visiting sailors; it merely adds to the general anarchy. The Beadle, as both Abe's business manager as well as the sole officer of the English Church, hides his feelings well.
Profits wax and wane seasonally, as do acquisitions and losses, and the visceral animosity never ends as dozens of colourful characters rollick around the intractable key figures. Crummey seduces us with his richness of language; he knows his characters inside out—hugely three-dimensional, they almost spill out of the pages. A reckoning will come to the siblings who may not be so different after all. The author leaves much to think about, and no doubt The Adversary is his most triumphant novel yet.
Widow Caines
▪ "She has taken to this preposterous dress which is vain and worldly and unnatural," he said. (23)
▪ Her understanding outstripped her tutor's in short order and at fourteen she set to work at the business in earnest. (73)
▪ She was still brazenly adorned in the green jacket and waistcoat, as if she had the heart and stomach of a man. (77)
▪ "Mr. Strapp wants a woman on her tail. I prefer my own two feet." (197)
▪ "That woman would eat her own children," Bride whispered. (221)
▪ "It is a mystery how you and Abe Strapp could have been sired by the same man upon the same woman. He is the simplest creature I have ever had the pleasure to pleasure," she said with a little laugh. (233)
Abe Strapp
▪ He was a fright for a child to look upon as a prospective husband, bacon-faced, with a small, full mouth that gave him the air of a greedy infant. (2)
▪ He cursed all hands as pug carpenters and purblind shankers, brow-beating even the handful of people who knew their trade. No one was happy to see him coming. (97-8)
▪ He was wearing a new jacket and waistcoat, a silk shirt and a tricorn hat, white stockings and black leather shoes with square brass buckles on the face. Prinked up, people said, like he came out of a bandbox. (158)
▪ "My brother kills everything he touches, Mr. Clinch. My mother being the first of those." (170)
▪ "It's a woman's job to know when to shut her mouth and when to open her legs," Abe insisted. (197)
▪ "Abe Strapp is a mile wide and an inch deep," Aubrey said. (268)
Other Bits
▪ The arm's infection had reached the elbow and the amputation was to be made several inches above the joint, a tourniquet reefed tight about the bicep. Solemn stoked the fire high and the Beadle set an iron poker to heat among the coals. (79)
▪ The following night, forty-eight armed men rowed ashore with muffled oars, their ship skulking into Mockbeggar's harbour once they'd landed and taken up positions throughout the village. (194)
▪ "You is a well-met crowd of eejits," Mary Oram said. "There's tea made here when you comes to your senses." (216)
▪ The summer was a season of sullenness and resentments. ... The fickleness of the sea they relied on made everyone crooked and unreasonable. (241)
▪ Brother and sister circling each other, that corkscrew tightening every season since their father's death. (294)
The Petition
A petition, Clinch read.
It was addressed to the island's governor and enumerated the many moral failings and abuses that made Abe Strapp unfit to hold public office. The shooting death of an Irish servant which had never been properly investigated and was considered by many an act of murder. Offering predatory loans in drinking establishments at usurious rates. His use of the court's constables and convicted felons as debt collectors, a practice which was prejudiced and unreasonable violent and forced fishermen into business with C. Starpp & Son, notwithstanding their commitments to other firms. Lastly and most recently, his establishment and living off the proceeds of a common bawdy house in Mockbeggar, to the detriment of all on the shore. "The whole constitution of the town," the petition said, "is corrupted into debauchery, drunkenness, whoring, gaming, profuseness, and the most foolish, sottish prodigality imaginable."
In its tone of righteous anger, in its ecclesiastical cadence and vocabulary, it sounded to the Beadle as if he might have written the petition himself. (167)
More contemporary insults
filthy dishclout; shitten shepherd; cork-brained calf-lollies; noddypeak simpletons; young malkintrash; dirty bunter; whore's kittling; dirty puzzle; turdy-gut; dog booby; grutnols; tripes and trullibubs; dirty shag-bag.
Katherine Faulkner. The Other Mothers. Ebook download from TPL's Libby. Simon & Schuster, 2023.
Natasha ("Tash") and Tom live on his doctor's frugal hospital salary while she seeks outlets for her freelance journalism. For her it's a balance between earning and caring for Finn, their adored two-year-old. A story Tash pursues is about Sophie Blake, a young nanny found dead in the local reservoir. Tash's investigation ‒ was it really murder? ‒ raises all kinds of surprises, including anonymous threats to stop what she's doing. After enrolling Finn in a playgroup (this is England), Tash is befriended by three of the glamorous, wealthy mothers—Laura, Claire, Nicole—although their lifestyle is beyond her means. I don't want to give away a very complicated plot, but some of them knew Sophie, and don't want to talk about her. Sophie had cared for the two children of Claire and Jeremy.
Juxtaposing Sophie's actions before her death with Tash's growing suspicions about her new friends and their husbands, both told in first person, is done with great timing for maximum suspense. Odd woman out in the playgroup is another mother, lawyer Christina, who worked with Jeremy's first wife. Her nanny Sal was a friend of Sophie and may have answers for Tash, but Sal is not inclined to cooperate—she's in danger, which Tash realizes too late. No one, including Tom, is happy about Tash's persistence with the story; a few marriages are looking shaky. If there's a killer, anyone could be the suspect.
The Other Mothers is not your standard thriller. Author Faulkner's presentation is somehow counter-intuitive in both the story and how it is told. The glamour moms are skin deep, of course, hiding roiling secrets and extolling motherhood. Domestic psychology at its most dramatic with moments of disbelief.
Tasha
▪ Finn is our shared deity, the creature around whom our two lives orbit. (26)
▪ He is putting the stitches in now, black thread pinched between his teeth, his fingers red with my freshly shed blood. (80)
▪ Truthfully, I'm not a huge fan of how much daytime drinking these playdates seem to involve. (85)
▪ "I mean is this journalism, or are you trying to solve a murder—a murder you don't even know was committed?" (146)
▪ ... the more I see of Claire's, Laura's, and Nicole's lives, the more I could see how transformative money was for parenting. (156)
▪ If Tom loses his job, it is not likely he'll get another one. It's not like that for doctors. (232)
▪ "A girl who was found dead, and whose picture I found in your sock drawer!" (306)
Sophie
▪ I bit my lip, wondering why I didn't feel I could tell her the truth. (73)
▪ I didn't particularly need his help anymore. He's shown me how to do it. (127)
▪ "I think you'll find that I'm the adult in this scenario, Jez," I hiss. "And thank God for that! Somebody needs to be their fucking mother!" (279)
▪ This was Jez's other woman. And what did that make me? (304)
▪ "I want them punished," I said. "I want them to lose everything." (310)
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