A life without technology

THE WAY HOME: TALES FROM A LIFE WITHOUT TECHNOLOGY by Mark Boyle Oneworld, £9.99

BOYLE’S known as the Moneyless Man and the author of the Moneyless Manifesto, having lived a full three years without cash, debit or credit card. Now, he has gone a step further, eschewing technology altogether to eke out a living on a smallholding in County Galway with girlfriend Kirsty who seems less easily adapted to the life than he but also provides a joyous contrast to his sometimes ascetic and weighed-down demeanour.

Before email and the phone were switched off, Boyle was invited to write about the experiment, as he had done before when living without money. What emerges in The Way Home isn’t a diary, as one might expect, but a more considered and structurally complex account of his new way of living, interwoven with a literary exploration of a curious sub-genre in Irish writing, the large body of work written by Blasket Islanders. The little archipelago sits off the coast of County Kerry, to the south of Boyle’s new home, populated until the early 1950s by an Irishspeaking population who, like the St Kildans, were eventually evacuated to the mainland. They left behind some classics of Irish rural writing, like

Peig Sayers’ Peig and Muiris Ó Súillebháin’s Fiche Blian ag Fás (better known in English as Twenty Years A-Growing).

Boyle’s account of his new makedo-and-mend lifestyle is less compelling than his interspersed accounts of a visit to Great Blasket Island and his physical encounter with a way of life and literature that have been part of Ireland’s nostalgic self-image for decades, though largely lost in the years of the Celtic Tiger.

Boyle finds himself in a new clockless reality. Circadian rhythms and diurnal habits become important again. And so does a kind of mutual dependency among neighbours, who seem unaffectedly generous and giving. In a sense the near presence of others means that things don’t change fundamentally. There are still drinks in the pub, until the pub is closed like so many rural establishments, and there are lifts in cars, when needed. With no licensed premises nearby, Boyle finds the little síbín that he runs at the smallholding becomes more popular. He also runs a bunkhouse for others who want to experience a decluttered life.

Perhaps the key moment in the book comes away from County Galway, when Boyle is doing some teaching in England. First of all, he lays out his fee for the course and allows his students to debate and determine what best might be done with the cash. Such experiments always have a nervy Stanley Milgramish air about them, though Boyle doesn’t make that connection, almost as if they were an invitation to behave selfishly or even greedily, though these students have enough altruism to acknowledge the higher imperatives. During the same trip, though, Boyle takes a sledgehammer to a colleague’s laptop. Horror. Needless to say, the moment is set up and the machine an old and superseded one, but the impact on the students is almost as great as the impact on the plastic and wire of the machine. Boyle poses deep and subversive questions. Are we becoming machines? Does it take renunciation of technology to recognise that fully? Is there – to anticipate some kind of workable compromise – a middle way?

Most books about “alternative” ways of life – and this includes Thoreau’s sanctified Walden – have their boringly vicarious elements. Romantics take them as manuals and manifestos. Cynics read them in the comfort of their own homes, preferably on Kindle. Boyle is fascinating, often touching and funny, on the little fixes that a no-technology life requires, but he’s better when he digs into the deeper question of who we are, the problems of being what Milgram called The Individual In A Social World, or in this case human in an increasingly mechanised world. Alexa! Turn the page...

REVIEW BY BRIAN MORTON

Circadian rhythms are important again