Warring siblings push a town to the edge in novel ‘The Adversary’

It likely has something to do with my surname and birth order, but I’ve always felt sympathy for Cain, the dutiful older child whose sacrifice was rejected by Yahweh, that tetchy deity, tipping the farmer into fratricidal fury and dooming him to his own special mark in Judeo-Christian mythology.

Canadian novelist Michael Crummey recasts Cain and Abel in his mordant, masterful “The Adversary,” set on the bleak northern coast of Newfoundland in the early 19th century and starring an indelible brother-sister act. Their mutual loathing pushes their community to the brink of collapse. You won’t forget this pair.

“The Driven Snow. A Winter Wedding.” “A Green Coat. Pack Ice.” From these chapter titles, Crummey unspools his blood feud amid the twin villages of Mockbeggar and Nonsuch. As the wealthiest investors among the cod fisheries and mercantile businesses, the Widow Caines and her younger sibling, Abe Strapp, drive the economy.

Brilliant at math, the widow lives alone, dresses in her late husband’s coat and trousers and smokes a pipe. Not her brother’s keeper, she’s a superego to Abe’s id. He’s a sadistic cretin, addicted to grog and sex, never missing an opportunity to humiliate anyone in his sphere, including middle-aged Beadle, a sketchy pastor and Strapp mainstay. Like Yahweh, the Beadle plays favorites, twisting the law to benefit Abe.

Bawds. Marauders. A chatty crow. Crummey’s supporting cast is as beautifully shaded as his trio of principals.

A companion piece to Crummey’s lauded “The Innocents,” “The Adversary” evokes the dangers of a cold, isolated outpost: casual rapes and murders, amputations and transgressive desires, a simmering rivalry between Anglican and Quaker congregations. The Widow gathers the innocents, people and animals alike, beneath a cloak of protection, but is she as virtuous as Abe is decadent? Bride, a servant girl, tells brother Solemn that the Widow would kill her own children if she had any (a foreshadowing in reverse).

Crummey weaves forgotten idioms into dialogue and action, creating a knotty, muscular, incantatory language that builds on Melville and Proulx as much as biblical antecedents, as when the Widow out-maneuvers Abe: “All spring he’d clanked about in the iron chains of his sister’s success as if he’d been cuckolded . . . He railed against the understrappers at his office and his actuaries in Poole as cork-brained calf-lollies, as noddypeak simpletons.”

The story may be dark but each sentence sparkles; there’s even a pornographic paragraph that ruts and grunts its way into poetry. (No spoilers.)

Hard work, poor pilgrims, a pitiless God: Crummey conjures this remote world with sensuous immediacy. “The fickleness of the sea they relied on made everyone crooked and unreasonable. Boats drifted from their traditional grounds in search of the meagre cod, encroaching on territory fished by other crews who ran them off with curses and threats, pelting them with the squid and herring going rotten in the bait tubs.”

Exquisite prose. Spellbinding drama. (And one tiny anachronism.) “The Adversary” is a magnificent novel that reinvents and subverts the Genesis account until its final page. “Neither man was quite able to shake the sense the Widow would escape their designs,” Crummey writes of Abe and the Beadle. “As if a biblical prophecy they’d set their compass by was turning to ash as they watched.”

Hamilton Cain, who also reviews for the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post, lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The Adversary

By: Michael Crummey.

Publisher: Doubleday, 336 pages, $29.