“The Scallop Plot” by former Boston Globe health columnist Judy Foreman seems like an ideal choice for a Cape Cod guest house bookshelf, a thriller to flip through idly on a rainy day. It’s full of immersive descriptions of Provincetown and vicinity, with plenty of local landmarks and restaurants namechecked. And it leaves the reader feeling a little bit smarter about wind power and scallop harvesting. However, a more attentive read quickly proves problematic.
The book’s fundamental problem is that the scallop plot is revealed in great detail early on. We learn that Swedish entrepreneur Olaf Svensson — who is creepily obsessed with young real-life climate activist Greta Thunberg — is taking his failed wind farm operation to Provincetown, along with a sinister plan to circumvent complications from the area’s local scallop fishing industry.
It’s all in the name of saving the planet, he and his fellow Swedes, hot newlywed marine biologists Astrid and Leif, tell themselves. If dozens of people die scallop-related deaths along the way, it’s just collateral damage in the fight. C’est la vie.
The book’s thrills, such as they are, get going when scrappy reporter Samantha Fuller’s spidey sense starts tingling. She teams up with scrappy scallop fisherwoman Isabella Ferreira to collect evidence for a story. Said evidence is gathered at a pace that is probably pretty realistic, but it is glacial for a thriller. Two years literally go by.
While Samantha is the most well-written and fully realized character, her central role makes the drama hinge more on getting the story than on saving lives. Too much information is conveyed secondhand, diluting any sense of tension.
Foreman makes other odd choices, like spending more time on Isabella’s daughter’s traffic accident — meaningless to the overall story — than on the deaths caused by the scallop plot. And much of the book proves repetitive, as Samantha tracks down facts about the plot that the reader already knows. These same facts are also repeated during the climactic trial and in Samantha’s triumphally reported news story, which is published here in full.
Also published in full is Samantha’s story: “Broken Turbine Blade Falls Into the Ocean.” This appears following a page in which we hear Samantha learn that a broken blade has fallen into the ocean and, two paragraphs later, inform someone else.
Much of the dialogue is eyeroll-inducing. Flat expository statements abound. “Astrid, I recognize you, even though your hair is different. It is you,” was a personal favorite.
On the plus side, the book seems deeply reported and raises compelling questions about environmental ethics. Underneath the silliness, it explores a very real dilemma: How do we balance the need for clean energy with the costs its technology may create for other parts of the environment or to people’s livelihoods — and who gets to decide what costs are acceptable?
Samantha and other characters admit that they haven’t thought about these issues much beyond “Wind power=good.” The book is at its most interesting as she gets into the nuances, tapping her sources about the potential risks from offshore windfarms and sifting out misconceptions promoted by right-wing groups under the guise of environmental advocacy.
For example, a scientist she interviews states that there is no causal link between low-frequency noise from wind turbines and harm to human health, and that climate change and cats pose more of a risk to bird populations than wind farms.
According to a recent study, bivalve shellfish fisheries are expected to be the most impacted by offshore wind development. Foreman’s characters land on the idea that fishermen can play an important role in the responsible development of wind power, and that they deserve compensation to offset losses to their livelihoods.
In the real world, mechanisms do exist to address direct economic impacts from offshore wind projects in Massachusetts, which are proceeding despite opposition from the federal government.
Foreman succeeds when she’s laying out the facts. Her fiction, unfortunately, fails to deliver.
A stronger
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