The Way Home: Tales from a Life Without Technology, out June 11th, reviewed

Tales from a Life Without Technology

By @SimonCocking review of The Way Home: Tales from a Life Without Technology by Mark Boyle. Available from Amazon here.

It was 11pm when I checked my email for the last time and turned off my phone for what I hoped would be forever.

No running water, no car, no electricity or any of the things it powers: the internet, phone, washing machine, radio or light bulb. Just a wooden cabin, on a smallholding, by the edge of a stand of spruce.

THE WAY HOME is a modern-day Walden ? an honest and lyrical account of a remarkable life lived in nature without modern technology. Mark Boyle, author of THE MONEYLESS MAN, explores the hard won joys of building a home with his bare hands, learning to make fire, collecting water from the stream, foraging and fishing.

What he finds is an elemental life, one governed by the rhythms of the sun and seasons, where life and death dance in a primal landscape of blood, wood, muck, water, and fire – much the same life we have lived for most of our time on earth. Revisiting it brings a deep insight into what it means to be human at a time when the boundaries between man and machine are blurring.

This is a topical and thought provoking book. When we even told people about the subjet of the book it raised a lot of comments and passion in people, both positive and negative. Boyle recognises the challenge of what he is trying to do, and honestly documents his own imperfections in the face of this eco effort he is undertaking. In many ways this enables him to tread the right side of a difficult line between eco-enthusiast and eco-masochist.

Boyle tries to take it as far as possible, even taking down his polytunnel in order to only grow Irish species of edible plants and vegetables. We enjoyed reading his book, and admired his honesty, while not completely agreeing with all of his actions or assertions. That said he is deeply steeped in a series of wise and wonderful previous ecological writers, from Thoreau to Edward Abbey, John Muir, Aldo Leopold and many other great and inspirational nature writers.

It is a tough journey for him, he even documents the heartbreak of his partner(s) deciding his life is not for them. So does this mean we can not survive without technology? Is his chosen course of actions a step too far for most of us? Is his approach even sustainable? While at times we loved the journey he was documenting, in the back of our mind was the comparison with ‘Into the wild’ by Jon Krakauer. Another great tale of one man trying to be as ecologically pure as possible, and that one did not end well …

We hope that Boyle’s journey does not end in such dire circumstances, and he seems pragmatic and self aware that it will not, but you get the feeling that there is still more of the story to be told. We also wondered that if he did end up having a child with a future partner how would he deal with the possibility of a caesarian. Overall there is a lot of common sense in his thinking and writing so we imagine that he would not completely reject technology if it was a life and death situation.

Either way he asks a lot of relevant questions, suggests some honest and plausible answers and has created a life-affirming and important book for us all to read. Too many of us spend too much of our time reacting to the dopamine hits from our smart phones and a book like this is an important attempt to help us to question and reevaluate our relationship to technology before it is too late.

See more reviews here.

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