An eco-thriller 17 million years in the making.
Seamus Quinlan is a geophysicist with a problem neighbor that also happens to be his employer—the Manhattan Project’s once top-secret Hanford Nuclear Site, currently the largest radioactive waste cleanup project anywhere on the planet.
After Seamus’s father succumbs to the cancer that killed the rest of his family, Seamus attempts to make something of the family’s barren acreage, while overseeing ground stability assessments for the Department of Energy in a region whose past was riddled by basalt lava flows, catastrophic floods, and seismic hijinks. Anomalies around the Quinlan farmhouse lead to a collapsing graveyard, sending Seamus on a subterranean quest during which he learns more about his family’s roots, decides to blow the whistle on a coming environmental catastrophe, and, not incidentally, falls in love with his colleague, Cody Getz. An improbable doomsday scenario ushered into the frightening realm of the plausible, To Pay Paul is a tale of how individuals survive when longstanding environmental debts finally come due.
Michael Scott Curnes is an award-winning American Canadian author. To Pay Paul is his fifth novel, and a sequel to his Green Book Award-winning novel, For the Love of Mother (2011).
An eco-thriller 17 million years in the making.
Seamus Quinlan is a geophysicist with a problem neighbor that also happens to be his employer—the Manhattan Project’s once top-secret Hanford Nuclear Site, currently the largest radioactive waste cleanup project anywhere on the planet.
After Seamus’s father succumbs to the cancer that killed the rest of his family, Seamus attempts to make something of the family’s barren acreage, while overseeing ground stability assessments for the Department of Energy in a region whose past was riddled by basalt lava flows, catastrophic floods, and seismic hijinks. Anomalies around the Quinlan farmhouse lead to a collapsing graveyard, sending Seamus on a subterranean quest during which he learns more about his family’s roots, decides to blow the whistle on a coming environmental catastrophe, and, not incidentally, falls in love with his colleague, Cody Getz. An improbable doomsday scenario ushered into the frightening realm of the plausible, To Pay Paul is a tale of how individuals survive when longstanding environmental debts finally come due.
Michael Scott Curnes is an award-winning American Canadian author. To Pay Paul is his fifth novel, and a sequel to his Green Book Award-winning novel, For the Love of Mother (2011).
“YOU KNEW ALL ALONG you were robbing Peter, right?” “Peter who?”
“Not Peter who. Think of Peter as the future, Pops.” Gerald Quinlan’s over-educated son, Seamus, adjusted the worn bill of his Tri-City Dust Devils baseball cap, squeegeeing the sweat off his forehead and into his hair. “Think of Peter as now or even tomorrow, if that helps.”
“Ah,” the father said—thinking, as he always did, that in Cen- tral Washington, having a PhD was about as useful as turn signals on a tractor. The skinny octogenarian groaned, realizing his last surviving son was just being clever again. He played along. “And Paul was back then—the past, I suppose?” He sucked on his Marl- boro, holding the nosepiece and oxygen tubing a cautionary arm’s length away from his cigarette. “The same past I suppose you feel I screwed up royally?” he added with a smoky exhale.
“Precisely.” Seamus stared his father down for a beat before revealing a trace of that classic Quinlan grin. He shared his father’s good Irish looks and the same crooked smile—pleasant features that helped him wriggle out of most entanglements. What he couldn’t always sidestep was the quicksand that had oozed between them like a slurry of topsoil after a rigid downpour, ever ready to swallow him whole.
TO PAY PAUL by Michael Scott Curnes
Seamus Quinlan is a geophysicist, an expert in prehistoric basalt lava flows, part of a team trying to clean up the nearly 600 square miles of the highly radioactive Hanford nuclear complex in Washington State. At the start Seamus needs to bury his father who has died of cancer, having worked at the plant. He is alone at the family farm, a truly isolated spot, but is helped by Cody, a visiting colleague from the Priest Rapids dam, ten miles upstream from Hanford. The family graveyard is some distance away on a hill and as Seamus and Cody are lowering the coffin it crashes to the grave bottom, the earth dissolves beneath their feet and they and the coffin plunge into an underground basalt cavern at least 20 feet below ground. Both are injured and there is no mobile signal. Thus the tale begins.
Seamus and Cody’s adventures and love story are interwoven with Seamus’s pursuit of a man blackmailing Cody, while at the same time the danger to the Hanford Complex grows. Much of the massive quantities of nuclear waste - corrosive, physically hot, and dangerously radioactive liquid - is stored in leaking tanks, and the Complex lies below a series of upstream dams on the Columbia River. Seamus realises that an earthquake may release the water and send millions of gallons of toxic waste into the Pacific. As he worries an earthquake strikes.
Seamus is a worthy protagonist and the ecological warning in the novel is plain. However, I didn’t feel that the various strands of the story held together well as the action is constantly interrupted by info-dumps. For example, when at one point Seamus is pursuing the blackmailer the tale stops to report word for word his lecture to students about the geological structures surrounding the Complex, including the line, the next slide revealed the sum of the equation as 1.0970174e+14. But what about the blackmailer? I want to ask.
Some of the material was very explicit (for example, Seamus’s encounter with the blackmailer in a seedy bar) and I thought the man’s turnaround highly unlikely. A structural edit would certainly have helped as the content relating to the Hanford site and the geological risks was fascinating and the story worth telling.