World Made by Hand: A Novel | James Howard Kunstler

World Made by Hand: A Novel | James Howard Kunstler | Read "The Long Emergency First"

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World Made by Hand...

	World Made by Hand: A Novel James Howard Kunstler Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 91 reviews view larger image
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In the best-seller The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler explored how the terminal decline of oil production had the potential to put industrial civilization out of business. With World Made By Hand Kunstler makes an imaginative leap into the future, a few decades hence, and shows us what life may be like after these coming catastrophes?the end of oil, climate change, global pandemics, and resource wars?converge. For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is not what they thought it would be. Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy. And the outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren?t sure. As the heat of summer intensifies, the residents struggle with the new way of life in a world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields and rivers replenished with fish. A captivating, utterly realistic novel, World Made by Hand takes speculative fiction beyond the apocalypse and shows what happens when life gets extremely local.

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World made by hand

It was a good read. The writer manipulated my assumptions of the characters in a subtle, yet effective way. Also, I enjoyed the detail of description that people in the story went to cope with life with the lack of today's infrastructure. Thought provoking.

Read "The Long Emergency First"

You need to read "The Long Emergency" by Kunstler before you read this book. The former is his projection of the breakdown of the hydrocarbon based society we live in today "World Made By Hand" is a fictionalized account of the society which follows the collapse of that world. The book is believable and adheres to the authors vision of the future. It's a good work of science fiction and provides some "food for thought" along the way.

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"And that is the end of the story..."

James Howard Kunstler is best known for nonfiction writing in which he speculates about whether or not "peak oil" has been reached and how an ever-decreasing oil supply might impact society from that point onward. Kunstler's nonfiction paints a gruesome picture of what life will be like when there is no more oil to be had and he places that scenario in the relatively near future. I'm not particularly inclined to agree with what Kunstler has to say in his role of gloom and doom prophet, but I did enjoy World Made by Hand, the novel based upon his predictions of what is to come.

World Made by Hand, and the post-apocalyptic world Kunstler has created within it, can certainly be challenged as to the likelihood that a gradually disappearing oil supply would ever create such a drastic societal change. But if one reads the novel as simply a depiction of one of an infinite number of possible futures for this country, it starts to resemble science fiction and can be a good bit of fun.

The novel is set in Union Grove, New York, a little Adirondack community peopled by survivors of a series of catastrophes that have devastated the United States over the last decade. They have survived a major flu epidemic that seems to have wiped out a huge segment of the population, nuclear explosions in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles, and the complete disappearance of the crude oil supply that made their former lifestyle possible. They have created their own little world, one without contact with anyone much more than thirty miles in any direction, and they have settled into a relatively apathetic new existence of making-do and doing-without.

The Union Grove area is already home to three separate groups when what appears to be a fundamentalist Christian sect searching for a new home suddenly appears in town, buys the old high school, and begins to create a new home for itself there. The townspeople themselves are, for the most part, people who had formerly lived a middle-class, white-collar lifestyle. There is also a self-sustaining group living a serf-like existence on a large paternalistic farm where they give up much of their independence in exchange for better food and a few of the luxuries, like electricity, that have disappeared elsewhere in the area. And there is a lawless group, living in trailers and whatever other shelter they can throw together on the edge of town, that is headed up by a ruthless leader determined to take from those weaker than himself whatever he needs or wants.

When conflict and violence threaten the citizens of Union Grove, distrust of outsiders has to be set aside and new alliances formed if any semblance of an orderly society is to survive there. World Made by Hand is the story of good people forced to adapt in ways they never expected to have to adapt, and not all of the changes pertain to their physical lifestyles. They are also challenged to change their whole concept of right and wrong, their willingness to use whatever force is necessary to protect themselves, and the way that they see their place in this diminished world.

Kunstler has created a post-apocalyptic world that still offers hope to those determined to live a moral life under such changed circumstances. His novel maintains a realistic atmosphere throughout until his unfortunate decision near the very end to give it a touch of the supernatural, a change of tone that largely diminishes the novel that it could have been. Whether or not Kunstler was having difficulty finding an ending for his book or not is only something he can answer, but his decision to end it the way he did, with a Cormac-McCarthy-meets-Stephen-King ending, was so jarring to me that I rated the novel a full point lower than I otherwise would have. That said, this one was still a good bit of fun.

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Dismal and flat

Kunstler's fictional account of our future without oil is overly dismal and lacking in heart. While I have been a follower of his theories on suburbia and the built environment, he has gone over the edge of reason in his peak oil theories which demonize technology and cars of all types.
In his fictitious future not only is there no oil, but no trade or transportation of any type. The skills our ancestors relied on to live civilized lives have disappeared- even bicycles and horses are not readily available. All those with practical skills, such as carpentry, mechanics, farming etc have been mysteriously wiped out by pandemics, leaving inept computer jockeys to scrape and claw out an existence.
The problem with this book is not only that this dismal portrayal is unrealistic, but the characters and plot do not engage us enough to make it through their dismal world with any feeling. As others have pointed out, the female characters exist primarily to have sex with the male characters, and have no other development. The main character has been deadened by all the tragedy he has lived through, which provides a thin excuse for the flatness of his ride through this apocalyptic landscape.

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