Underland

Macfarlane took me under the earth: I climbed with him into dark caves miles deep, into prehistoric burial sites 65,000 years old, into the understory of living creatures just beneath our feet and the wide web of the forest that connects all trees into a community, and into underground spaces where physicists unravel the cosmos searching for dark matter.

I now know there is a doomsday vault in the Arctic that preserves ninety million seeds for a post-apocalyptic future. I can never look at trees, the earth, or the cosmos in the same way. He warns of “species loneliness” if… show more.

Part travelogue, part natural history, this book about the hidden worlds beneath our feet – caves, mines, tunnels, root systems – enticed me into thinking in radically different ways about the natural world and about our planet.

It is written in a lyrical style, often elevating itself to a high form of prose poetry.

One is left with a deep sense of awe with respect to nature and Macfarlane’s supreme mastery of the English language.

When we talk about nature, we think of trees, lakes, rivers, oceans, mountains. But there is a parallel world that exists right beneath our feet! 

MacFarlane’s narration flows in a dreamlike prose and moves in gentle and deep shifts. The book that describes itself as “A book about burial and unburial and deep time” is one of the most mesmerising books on natural history that I have read. The prose is as transcendental as the subject matter. Formidably and masterfully told.

This is one of the most gorgeous, profound, and nail-biting books I have ever read. We may be an above-ground species, but, as MacFarlane shows, our underground spaces reveal as much if not about much about the human impact on planet earth. They illuminate “the deep time legacies we are leaving.” Stops on his underground tour include: the invisible city of tunnels beath Paris streets; a remote Norwegian sea cave filled with ancient wall paintings; hollowed-out mountains on the Italy-Slovak border soaked with wartime atrocities. But the most moving journey is into Greenland glaciers where ice sheets tens of thousands… show more.

The title does not understate. There are underworlds in the form of caverns and crevasses and mines and underground rivers, and Macfarlane seems to have explored every one of them. And survived; survival, in some of these explorations, was in question. He brings the subterranean into the light for those of us who’ve never ventured into the dark, confined, and bizarre spaces beneath the earth’s surface--and never will. He explores and illuminates the geography and the geology. He writes so vividly you’ll think you are there.

Humans create all kinds of borders. They’re invaluable in helping us make sense of the world. Robert Macfarlane’s book brilliantly explores what might be called “dark borders.” From below ground borders via, for instance, caves into which he takes his readers (claustrophobic readers beware!) to the discovery of dark matter in the universe and how physicists “map” what can’t be seen. But the best part is his revealing the significance of these dark realms to the human experience...and, in the case of “dark matter,” to existence itself.