2019/49: Underland: A Deep Time Journey -- Robert Macfarlane

The same three tasks recur across cultures and epochs: to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful... Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save. [loc. 113]

Macfarlane's epic journey to the 'underland' -- the places beneath the earth -- is formed of three parts: 'Seeing' (caves, forests and a dark-matter research facility, all in England);'Hiding' (catacombs, underground rivers and the caves and fissures of karst uplands, in Europe); and 'Haunting' (cave paintings, undersea oil extraction, glaciers and a nuclear waste depository, all in 'the North'). One certainly gets the sense that the author, an experienced caver and mountaineer, is pushing his own physical limits at times.

But he is not, or not primarily, a scientist. He's given to poetic pronouncements, such as (speaking of sand-grains, once wind-smoothed in a desert, retrieved from beneath a glacier) he describes them as 'desert diamonds from the bottom of the world.' 'I can tell you’re not a scientist,' says his companion. Macfarlane, though, does have a keen understanding and an eye for significant detail. Throughout his explorations, he finds the right people to talk to, and these often are scientists: a mycologist describing the intricate network of fungi that connect the trees in Epping Forest, a physicist in search of dark matter 'shielded from the surface by 3,000 feet of halite, gypsum, dolomite, mudstone, siltstone, sandstone, clay and topsoil'.

Underland is full of myth and literature, too, from the Mithraic cults and katabases (descents underground) of pre-Christian religions to the claustrophobic explorations in Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. (Personally, Garner's description of getting stuck in a narrow tunnel beneath Alderley Edge, horrified me so much that the chances of my willingly going caving are microscopically low.) Macfarlane is eclectic: Philip Larkin ('what will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207'), Greek tragedy, the Kalevala, Ursula Le Guin, Jules Verne ... And the connections are not limited to the claustrophobia (or claustrophilia?) of the underland: Macfarlane ranges through the sense of disconnection experienced by those who see their familiar landscapes destroyed, the urge towards art -- cave paintings, friezes of bone, sculpture -- underground, the 'past pain and present beauty' of former war-zones, the way that time seems to work differently when one is hidden from the sun.

The cover design ('Nether') is splendid. Like Macfarlane, I thought it showed a bright sunset at the end of a country lane. No, says the artist. "[It] isn't the sun. It's the last thing you'd ever see. It's the light of a nuclear blast that has just detonated, seen down a holloway. When you look at Nether, you've got about 0.001 of a second of life remaining, before the flesh is melted from your bones."

Because running through Underland is the urgent message that we are wrecking the world: that the nuclear waste and the proofs of genocide will surface, the abandoned diggers beneath the North Sea and the concrete-entombed body of a dead caver will outlast us, the glaciers -- retreating faster than satellite mapping can follow -- will unbury their burdens of ancient ice and forgotten corpses.

That Underland succeeds in being a beautiful and erudite description of what lies beneath us, as well as a discourse on climate change, ecological catastrophe and human suffering, seems to me a triumph. Even when I was reading about topics that distressed or angered me, I was enjoying the prose. True, Macfarlane does occasionally stumble on that thin line between 'poetic' and 'flaky', but he's so sincere that I didn't balk much at sentences such as 'I'd like to die and be reborn as a boulder here'. And his prose is immensely evocative and often moving: there's a description of a chunk of black ice calving from a glacier that is spectacularly immediate.

Underland flickers from reports of conversations with the people who know these places best -- cavers, ecological activists, cataphiles -- to passages that feel like simple transcriptions of notes scribbled 'on site', the author's stream-of-consciousness narrative of what he is experiencing. It's not just darkness and silence, not just doom and gloom: there is fascination, appreciation of beauty, and a real joy in his surroundings. I almost want to go caving. Almost.

I am extremely grateful to NetGalley for providing a free review copy in exchange for this honest review.

Robert Macfarlane on creating the cover of Underland with artist Stanley Donwood
Robert Macfarlane on writing Underland
Alex Preston's review in the Guardian