- Rawles, James Wesley.
Expatriates.
New York: Dutton, 2013.
ISBN 978-0-525-95390-6.
-
This novel is the fourth in the series which began with
Patriots (December 2008),
then continued with
Survivors (January 2012)
and
Founders (October 2012).
These books are not a conventional multi-volume narrative, in
that all describe events in the lives of their characters in
roughly the same time period surrounding “the
Crunch”—a grid down societal collapse due to a debt
crisis and hyperinflation. While the first three books in the
series are best read in order, as there is substantial overlap
in characters and events, this book, while describing
contemporary events, works perfectly well as a stand-alone
thriller and does not contain substantial spoilers for
the first three novels.
The earlier books in the series were thrillers with a heavy
dose of survival tutorial, including extended litanies of
gear. The present volume leans more toward the thriller genre
and is, consequently, more of a page-turner.
Peter and Rihannon Jeffords are Christian missionaries
helping to run an orphanage in the Philippine Islands
wishing nothing more than to get on with their lives
and work when the withdrawal of U.S. forces in the
Pacific due the economic collapse of the U.S. opens
the way for a newly-installed jihadi government in
Indonesia to start flexing its imperialist ambitions,
looking enviously at Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the
Philippines, and ultimately the resource-rich and
lightly populated “Top End” of Australia
as their manifest destiny.
Meanwhile, Chuck Nolan, a Texan petroleum geologist specialising
in explosive seismic exploration, working in the
Northern Territory of Australia, is adjusting, along
with native Australians, to the consequences of the
Crunch. While not directly affected by the U.S.
economic collapse, Australia's highly export-driven economy
has been severely damaged by the contraction in world
trade, and being dependent upon imported food and
pharmaceuticals, hardships are everywhere and tragedies
commonplace.
Back in the United States, Rihannon Jeffords' family, the
Altmillers, are trying to carry on their independent hardware
store business in Florida, coping with the collapse of the
currency; the emergence of a barter economy and
use of pre-1965 silver coins as a medium of
exchange; the need for extraordinary security precautions
at work and at home as the rule of law and civil society
erode; and escalating worries about feral mobs of
looters raiding ever wider from the chaos which
was Orlando.
As the story develops, we exerience a harrowing sea voyage
through hostile waters, asymmetrical warfare against a first
world regional power, irregular resistance against an invader,
and local communities self-organising defence against an urban
“golden horde” ravaging the countryside. You will
learn a great deal about partisan resistance strategies,
decapitation of opposition forces, and why it is most unwise
for effete urban populations to disarm those uncouth and
disdained denizens of the boonies who, when an invader
threatens, are both the first and ultimate lines of defence.
This book is meticulously researched with a wealth of local
and technical details and only a few goofs and copy-editing
errors. Like the earlier novels, the author dispels, often
with spare prose or oblique references, the romantic notion
that some “preppers” seem to have that the
collapse of civilisation will be something like a camping trip
they'll enjoy because they're “ready”. These
happy would-be campers overlook the great die-off, the consequences
of masses of people suddenly withdrawing from mood-altering
drugs, roving bands of looters, the emergence of war-lords,
and all of the other manifestations of the normal state of
humanity over millennia which are suppressed only by our
ever-so-fragile just in time technological society.
October 2013 