David W. Straight
This is a finely-written view of a post-collapse America. Cormac Mccarthy’s novel Road was an altogether darker vision: James Howard Kunstler’s book World Made by Hand is neither as dark or foreboding. Society functions, but only locally–there are no national or even regional governments, as far as is known. We’ve gone from Friedman’s The World is Flat to a world where communication and trade resembles that of, say, 800AD. “Here be Dragons” might as well appear on maps. The number of people in Union Grove in upstate New York who have travelled more than 50 miles from home is small, at least until a flock of The New Faith arrive from Virginia.
The amenities are gone: no gasoline, no bicycles (for want of rubber tires), no antibiotics, no anaesthesia, roads and bridges crumbling into complete disrepair. Yet life goes on, as America in 1700 got by without bicycles and antibiotics. Robert Earle, the central figure in the novel, works as a carpenter–his former life in computing is gone forever. Lack of oil, nuclear explosions, and the Mexican Flu all contributed to the collapse. The Flu took most of Earle’s family except for his son, who left on his own many years before and never heard from again. Earle takes things philosophically and with grace, and is more at ease with his world than most of us could be. In Earle, Kunstler has provided a rock about which life swirls: he provides a foundation of normality, insofar as normality can exist, and his character prevents a doom-and-gloom view type book from prevailing.
Kunstler presents a well-drawn picture of a world where there are no chain saws and power tools, no refrigeration, very little electric power anywhere. Paper money is disappearing, bartering is returning, work is done by hand. Horses are great assets. You will probably find yourself asking some questions: some of these are answered, some are not. After 20 or 30 years of life in places such as Union Grove, where are the clothes coming from? How many people could weave a shirt? There do not seem to be many sheep around for wool, and you get the impression from the book that everything isn’t animal skins. What about glassmaking for storage jars and windows? There should perhaps be a cottage industry for saltpeter to make gunpowder. But these are relatively minor. The primary thing is the wonderfully detailed, finely crafted view of a world where people have had to return to the amenities of colonial times, or even long before that. This is a novel that’s creative and well thought out: very worth reading.