Michael Crummey's latest novel digs into the inner world of power-hungry characters on the East Coast

The Next Chapter13:17Sibling rivalry is at the heart of Michael Crummey’s new novel, The Adversary

The Newfoundland author tells a story of a brother and sister who run the largest mercantile firms in the North Atlantic. As animosity and violence grows between the pair, their community becomes increasingly divided.

Steeped in the tensions of Atlantic fisheries, Michael Crummey's latest novel follows two characters duelling for power and the questionable lengths they will go to in order to obtain it.

The Adversary features two rivals who represent the largest fishing operations on Newfoundland's northern outpost. When a wedding that would have secured Abe Strapp's hold on the shore falls apart, it sets off a series of events that lead to year after year of violence and vendettas and a seemingly endless feud. 

• Michael Crummey's novel The Adversary is about feuding families and east coast fisheries

Crummey is a poet and novelist from Newfoundland and Labrador. He is also the author of the novels The Innocents, Sweetland and Galore and the poetry collections Arguments with Gravity and Passengers. Two of Crummey's novels have been shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction — Sweetland in 2014 and Galore in 2009. The Innocents was shortlisted for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the 2019 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction.

Shelagh Rogers spoke with Crummey at the 2023 Writers at Woody Point literary festival.

Early on we learn that Abe Strapp was like a mirror image of his father with all that was admirable in the father's nature, reversed. How do you get inside a character like Abe Strapp?

I feel like we've all been living in a world where Abe Strapp is in the ascendance. Where Abe Strapp is running things. I think that Donald Trump is much like Abe in the sense that he has no interior life. That his only sense of himself and his only gauge of what he is worth is from what he owns or what he can get from people and because the interior world is empty, it's a black hole and it can't be filled. So Abe is somebody who is constantly looking at everything around him in terms of, "How much of this do I own? How many of these people can I make do what I want them to do?"

That was his only way of feeling any kind of value in the world. That's how he measures himself out in the world. But there's a real temptation for readers to sympathize with the Widow and to look at her as the place that our sympathies should lie in the story and to root for her. But I have gone out of my way to make it clear that she and Abe are completely different in what they think is important and how they relate to people and the face that they present to the world, [and yet] they are exactly the same on the inside. 

This novel is about a community that is dominated by two black holes and everybody ends up in the orbit of one of those or the other.- Michael Crummey

So this novel is about a community that is dominated by two black holes and everybody ends up in the orbit of one of those or the other. This is a small community, these are two incredibly powerful irresistible black holes and in the end, everybody is sucked into them in one way or the other.

Even the innocents, even the people who try to do the best with what they can. 

The world you create and the world I visualized through reading your book is almost like a Hieronymus Bosch painting. It's just wild, in every corner something really debauched is going on, and Abe thrives on that, right? It feeds him. Is there ever an end to appetites like that?

I think death is an end to appetites like that. It seems clear to me that there are particular kinds of narcissism, but he also is somebody who is controlled by animal appetites, for lack of a better phrase. That it's drink, food, sex and power in the end. The Widow's not interested in drink or necessarily food or sex, except in some very particular circumstances that she has control over.

But power is what she wants as well and she's much more conscious of what moves her and why she's doing the things she's doing. But her goal in the end is exactly the same as her brothers. Abe is all bludgeoning, pushing and bullying and the Widow is much more calculating and sees way further than Abe is capable. She's playing chess in this book and Abe is watching other people play checkers on his behalf.

She's playing chess in this book and Abe is watching other people play checkers on his behalf.- Michael Crummey

The language, Michael, it's so rich and it's so dimensional. There was just a little phrase, "houses propped on higgly stilts," [I loved] the rhythm and the musicality of that. Are you looking for that consciously as you write?

I don't know how conscious I am of anything when I'm writing. I just hope for the best when I sit in the chair and I do think I have found a voice. In The Innocents and in this book in particular, there's a voice that fits this narrative that was automatic. It was there when I sat down and started writing the first page of each novel. It's something that feels completely natural to me now so when I'm writing those descriptions, it does feel like it just comes out.

It does feel like it's something that I'm not even conscious that I'm doing. In one way, you can say it took me six months to write this book. In another way, you could say it took me 40 years because I've been working towards being able to sit down and write like this for a long time.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.