"Underland" by Robert Macfarlane

A travel book in which the author explores a variety of subterranean landscapes including cave systems and glacier moulins as well as those that are manmade, such as the catacombs below Paris and mine-workings and underground storage facilies.

Much of the joy of this book lies in his descriptions. Here is one example, from the first page:

• “Late-summer heatwave, heavy air. Bees browsing drowsy over meadow grass. Gold of standing corn, green of fresh hay-rows, black of rooks on stubble fields. ... A swan flies high and south on creaking wings.” 

There is much of this throughout the book, combining detailed observation with precise vocabulary and perfect metaphor.

There’s a lot of science (from an experiment to detect dark matter, buried in an English mine, to geology to climate change), much of it viewed through a quasi-mystical lens. Most of the journeys that Macfarlane makes are, for him, deeply spiritual experiences, and he connects them with legends about the underworld, and more recent stories - perhaps legends in the making - such as the Victorian obsession with a hollow earth.

I found many of Macfarlane’s journeys horrific. He squeezes into impossibly narrow tunnels, descends gulping sinkholes, wades starless rivers and wanders underground labyrinths, sometimes describing his terror, and I really didn’t want to share his experiences. Even when he is above ground, climbing glaciers and mountain sides, often alone, sometimes in heavy fog, far from any prospect of help, I was terrified on his behalf.

My favourite part was his description of the underground urban explorers in the Paris catacombs: perhaps because I am fundamentally a townie I could understand the romance and excitement of this below-street counterculture (though I still wouldn’t go down there: too scary!).

He makes the point repeatedly that geology has a much longer time span than humans and that all our little lives and dreams will disappear into nothingness. But then he also talks about the ‘anthropocene’, the new geological era characterised by human activities, and implicitly suggests that we shouldn’t produce so much plastic waste, or consume so much oil, or mine so much, or bury long-half-life nuclear waste. “Viewed from the perspective of a desert or an ocean, human morality looks absurd - crushed to irrelevance.” (Ch 1)

There is a great deal to enjoy in this book ... but there is a great deal. I thought it went on too long. It belaboured the environmental message and over-romanticised the ‘little people’ who lived simple lives in impossibly beautiful (and often dangerous) landscapes - and still burned oil and produced wastes. And, at the end, there were just too many tunnels to squeeze through, too many mountains the climb, and the last ones just sounded the same as the earlier ones.

But the descriptions were beautiful.

Selected quotes:

• “An aversion to the Underland is buried in language. In many of the metaphors we live by, height is celebrated but depth is despised. To be ‘uplifted’ is preferable to being ‘depressed’ or ‘pulled down’. ‘Catastrophe’ literally means a ‘downwards turn’, ‘cataclysm’ is ‘downwards violence’.” (Ch 1)
• “To perceive matter than casts no shadow, you must search not for its presence but for its consequence.” (Ch 3)
• “If we’re not exploring, we’re not doing anything. We’re just waiting.” (Ch 3)
• “All cities are additions to the landscape that require subtractions from elsewhere.” (Ch 5)
• “A densely stacked modern cityscape leads, inevitably, to a new geography of inequality ... Broadly speaking, wealth levitates and poverty sinks.” (Ch 5)
• “Urban exploration mandates itself as a radical act of disobedience and liberation: a protest against state constraints on freedom within the city.” (Ch 5)
• “The city was full of portals - service hatches, padlocked doorways, manhole covers - that lay unseen in plain sight.” (Ch 5)
• “The leather noise of their wings kept time for me.” (Ch 5): Bats emerging from a cave at night
• “That cenote was understood by the local indigenous people to be an access point to the Mayan underworld, to ‘xibalba’ ... ‘place of fear’ ... a brutal realm ... heavily staffed by demons ... Just to reach Xibalba, you had to cross a river filled with scorpions, a river filled with blood, and a river filled with pus. If you were lucky to make it that far, you were then tested in the six deadly Houses of Trial.” (Ch 5)
• “The sound of this starless river is like none I have ever heard before. It has volume. Its volume has hollowness. Each sound has its echo, and each echo its interior.” (Ch 6)
• “In the Celtic Christian tradition, ‘thin places’ are those sites in a landscape where the borders between world or epochs feel at their [page break] most fragile. Such locations were ... often to be found on westerly headlands, islands, canvas, coasts and other brinks.” (Ch 8)
• “It is so cold the ink in my pen freezes in under a minute.” (Ch 10)

Shortlisted for the 2019 Waterstones Book of the Year

April 2022; 425 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God