Underland

 
Underland
A Deep Time Journey

by Robert MacFarlane

Norton
2019

 

 

Underland was a Christmas present a couple years ago. It's non-fiction, combining nature writing and travel writing, as MacFarlane travels to a number of underground sites, and both writes about the experience and uses it as a jumping off point to talk about history or climate change or whatever else is relevant.

 
MacFarlane goes caving in the limestone karst sort of near his home in England, visits a dark matter detection lab inside an abandoned salt mine, learns about the 'wood wide web' of fungal mycelia in forests, spends a week in the Paris catacombs, visits an underground river, goes mountaineering around caves and sinkholes in Slovenia where Nazis and Communists hid out from and executed one another during WWII, visits cave paintings, meets a fisherman-turned-environmentalist who opposes off-shore oil drilling in Norway, climbs up a glacier, clumbs down a glacial crevasse, and tours a site being prepared to store nuclear waste.

 
MacFarlane often narrates via a series of images. He gets a bit elagaic in the latter half of the book. A few of his caving and climbing feats seem stupidly dangerous, and he reports feeling fear during them, although he must be a fairly experienced hiker and climber, the way he gets around.

 
There are recurring motifs of him being awed by the size or depth or oldness of something he's encountered, of having no words to describe these unhuman places. There's also a running thread of his awareness of the damage humans are doing to the planet, and the near geoligical scale of our pollution or the effect of global warming. You could easily read just one chapter on a topic that interested you, but I was glad to take the whole tour.