[book_info title=”Underland: A deep time journey” author=”Robert Macfarlane ” publisher=”Penguin Books” title_link=”https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/560/56082/underland/9780241143803.html “]
LANDSCAPE essayist Robert Macfarlane has gone subterranean with his latest book, digging deep to understand our planet’s past and future and, he promises, to plumb the very depths of the human heart.
In Underland, he travels the world in search of “deep time” in deep places. This is mythology as much as geology, anthropology as much as climatology. He goes not underground or to the underworld, but to the underland, a mythical world of the Sami people of Scandinavia, a mirror-image of our world, inhabited by the dead, said to exist just beneath our feet.
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Macfarlane is a reader in literature and the geohumanities at the University of Cambridge by day. The academic with mud on his boots starts his journey into the underland by sliding down “the riven trunk of an old ash tree” into a deep, dark limestone cave, to see handprints made by ancients more than 35,000 years ago.
Over the next, extraordinary, 470 pages, he follows hermit cave dwellers, miners, palaeontologists and the Thai football team that got trapped in caves last year. He buries the dead, delves into labyrinths beneath volcanoes, surfs underground rivers, abseils into black voids, and walks the sewers of London and catacombs of Paris.
He unlocks the vault carved into a frozen mountain beneath Svalbard to house a “doomsday” store of the world’s crop seeds, and descends into mines earmarked to keep our nastiest radioactive waste safe for tens of thousands of years. Hades, he discovers, isn’t just the underworld of Greek myth, where the souls of the dead gather, but also the name of a prospective Belgian nuclear dump.
There is plenty of “real” science along the way. Macfarlane talks to mycologists about fungal networks that link the roots of trees in a “wood wide web” of chemical communication. He meets glaciologists in Greenland who are observing past climates by drilling cores of million-year-old ice, while watching as climate change hollows out the island’s ice cap.
“Now we have the tools to see backwards and to project the future, we seem hell-bent on ignoring their lessons”
And he shares trowels with archaeologists excavating Bronze Age barrows, and finds physicists holed up in the silence of a deep mine beneath the outskirts of Hida, Japan, to “hear the birth of the universe” in cosmic rays. Amid the geology of ancient eons, he contemplates what defines the age we like to call the Anthropocene.
As a bestselling writer and winner of literary prizes , Macfarlane is primed to explore inner human space too. He lauds the hallucinogenic power of claustrophobia, introspects in the darkness about the “realms of the dead”, and describes dropping into an iridescent shaft of melting ice in Greenland’s Knud Rasmussen glacier as being like entering “a pore in the skin of an immense creature”.
He marvels at the great and the small: at springs bursting from the earth near his home as much as murmurings and fracturings of ice caps as high as mountains. These, like manholes in city streets, cave networks and the entrance to Tutankhamun’s tomb, provide openings to his underland world.
Macfarlane has two big hypotheses fuelling his journeys. The first is that by going underground, drilling into the heart of our planet’s deep past, we find ways to understand its future. The second is that, at the same time, we can uncover the essence of what it means to be human. Because, he says, “throughout human history, we have placed in the underland that which we fear and wish to lose – and that which we love and wish to save”.
The first contention is persuasive. Through many examples, in which “ice breathes, rock has tides, mountains ebb and flow, stone pulses”, he shows how the exploration of “deep time” provides a radical new perspective on the hidden geological and Earth-system forces with which we meddle at our peril. He goes on to ask: “Are we being good ancestors to the future Earth?” Needless to say, he answers in the negative.
There is a profound paradox here. After all, when our species had little scientific ability to understand the past or predict the future, we were ruled by moral imperatives built on deep memory that instilled obligations about long-term stewardship of our environment. We were good ancestors – or at least as good as we could be in the circumstances. But now that we have the tools to see backwards and to project the future, we seem hell-bent on ignoring the lessons they offer.
Even someone with Macfarlane’s powers can’t disentangle this paradox. Perhaps as a result, his second contention, that by exploring ideas about underland we can uncover the human heart, is made less persuasive.
Here, his explorations sometimes descend into empty metaphor. Even when they are accompanied by the fictional journeys of fellow underland writers from Jules Verne and Lewis Carroll to Virgil, “digging deep” can appear shallow.
And some may find Macfarlane’s lyricism irritating. If you bristle at his early gambits that “darkness might be a medium of vision”, and that his descent into the bowels of the Earth “may be a movement towards revelation rather than deprivation”, you could be among them.
But when embarking on any long journey, you need to know that you will enjoy the company of your companion as well as the itinerary. And here you will be travelling with a considerable polymath, as willing and able to quote a Nature paper as Edgar Allan Poe, and to discuss the finer techniques of caving as surely as the physics of dark matter.
The bottom line is that if you enjoy Macfarlane’s style and intellect, as I do, you will enjoy the long journey into the underland.
