Book Review: Underland, by Robert MacFarlane

Hamish Hamilton, £20

I first read Robert MacFarlane’s entrancing book, The Wild Places, five or six years ago. Since then, I have devoured – such is his delicious prose style – his other works that examine what he calls “landscape and the human heart”. It was his description in The Old Ways of a “ritual walk” up through the Cairngorm massif, from Blair Atholl to Aviemore, that convinced me to enter that harsh and beautiful world of granite myself.

Mountaineering – in the Cairngorms – was where MacFarlane’s fascination with landscape began. The peculiar human obsession with reaching the summit was the subject of his first book, Mountains of the Mind. It is only natural then, that after spending so many years walking, climbing and sailing on the surface of the earth, he should want to go beneath it. His latest book, Underland, looks at various literal and literary “journeys into darkness” and “descents in search of knowledge.”

This obsession takes him all over Europe, from the limestone caves of the Mendips to the “invisible city” of passageways under Paris (“much of Paris was built from its own underland”), to Slovenian cave systems that still bear the marks of the fighting in WWII, and on to the melting glaciers of Greenland, where he is precariously lowered on a rope into a moulin, a meltwater opening in blue ice that disappears to nothing.

This is not, however, simply a book about exploration. A journey into the earth yields surprising insights: ancient burial grounds, beguiling cave art, the fungal networks connecting trees, and, naturally, scientists listening out for dark matter. Near the village of Boulby, on the Yorkshire coast, there are salt caverns where white-coated physicists sit in front of computers looking for the beginning of the world. There is too much sub-atomic noise above ground to hear “the breath of the birth of the universe.”

In his excavations, MacFarlane shows us that to descend is to discover the universe in a grain of sand, and to re-imagine ourselves in time. “We tend to imagine stone as inert matter, obdurate in its fixity,” but in the world of geology, stone is a fluid substance. It makes sense, especially if you reconfigure your own sense of time, and imagine yourself not as living within human timescales, but as being just another chemical compound within geological deep time.

You might not think an expansive sense of life would come from spending years wriggling through fissures in the earth, but that is the sense one gets from MacFarlane’s writing, which tells you something of his unique vision. Underland, however, is also his most deathly book since Mountains of the Mind. It’s not surprising. After all, many of us will end up under a slab of stone eventually. Some people die this way.

Neil Moss is the man at the heart of the most notorious British caving tragedy. In 1959, when Moss was 20 years old, he was part of an exploratory trip into the Peak Cavern, Derbyshire when he became stuck in a vertical shaft. Despite valiant efforts to rescue him, he ran out of oxygen and died. His father, Eric, requested his son be left alone rather than have others endanger themselves trying to bring his body out. Moss was officially buried there, entombed in concrete.

MacFarlane is a sponge for stories, real ones like this, and from literature throughout the ages. Along with his ability to befriend genuine characters and his diverse vocabulary of the natural world, it is what makes him such a good writer. In the Paris underground he calls up Victor Hugo; when discussing inosculation – the grafting of one tree onto another – he remembers the Greek myth of Baucis and Philemon; and when visiting a nuclear waste storage facility in Finland, he draws on Finnish folk epic the Kalevala, which is preoccupied with “the safe storage of dangerous material and the safe retrieval of precious materials.”

Although much of the world’s subterranea is formed through natural processes, humans “have drilled 30 milllion miles of tunnel and borehole in our hunt for resources, truly riddling our planet into a hollow earth.” Underland is many things, but most urgently it is a warning about climate change and the dangers of anthropocentricism. MacFarlane is too careful and nuanced a writer to fall into polemical mode. Rather, he outlines his fears – and the science – through poetic exposition.

In Greenland, he watches the Knud Rasmussen glacier calve into a fjord – “a blue cathedral of ice, complete with towers and buttresses” thunders into the water, followed by a “whole city of white and blue”. The experience is jolting and terrifying, a bit like reading Underland, a book that does what all good books should: gives you the vision and the language to re-imagine the world around you.