The Way Home: Tales from a Life Without Technology

A man forsakes modern gadgetry for labor and the land in this knotty saga of radical sustainability. Pivoting from the project of surviving without monetary exchanges that he recounted in his previous book The Moneyless Man, Boyle built a cabin on an Irish farm and vowed to live without computers, electricity, phones, plumbing, fossil-fueled heating, clocks, or any other “industrial-scale, complex technology” that “showed no respect for life.” He duly spends the book hewing wood, drawing water, growing vegetables, collecting manure, fishing for dinner, and writing diaristic vignettes by pencil and candlelight. Boyle’s haphazard technophobia and critique of “the mechanizing, homogenizing, industrializing, killing culture” of high-tech society are vehement but incoherent: he forbids himself matches but allows himself bicycles, steel tools, and hitchhiked rides, and never explains why a lower-tech world would be environmentally benign. More convincing is his Thoreauvian homage—“I wanted to put my finger on the pulse of life,” he writes, “feel cold and hunger and fear” and “lick the bare bones of existence clean”—to rustic authenticity; he writes vividly of Ireland’s village culture, with its neighborly sharing and cozy pubs, and of the satisfactions of hard work with tangible results. Boyle’s case against technology is thin, but his elegy for rural life is lovely. (June)