RaveThe Spectator...Time Song itself is a kind of beautiful bog, a memoir-cum-meditation focusing on the stretch of land that once connected Britain to the Continent ... Blackburn neither tunnels nor digs, but accepts and sifts. Rarely have I read a book in which there is such an entrancingly liquid and easy drift between the metaphorical and the actual, so that when she describes the ‘breathing’ surface of the North Sea, there is a crossing of boundaries in the phrase: breathing both now and in deep time, the ebbing and flowing of the sea across the land that for the moment lies beneath it, but will just as surely one day ebb again. It feels both Wordsworthian and Woolfian, accepting the dissolution of boundaries in a dynamic tidal psychic geography that becomes Blackburn’s description of the nature of being ... This is not science or history (there are enough books like that) but understanding ... This book is a wonder.
Robert Macfarlane
RaveThe Spectator\"The sublime requires the world to diminish as you watch, and for that diminution to leave you not with something less but something immeasurably more. This is Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful dark subject in the most powerful book he has yet written ...
The book hums and sings between its polarities ... Underland...is carefully considered, so that physically, emotionally, intellectually, Macfarlane entirely fills the dark and rocky spaces in which the book dwells: the ambition is huge, aiming no less than to establish another dimension in which to encounter existence, but it is also honest in its failings and uncertainties. It isn’t caught up in its own language, as you might fear, but it’s often capable of concentrated lyric moments ... It probes the invisible as the place of the imagination, marshalling the mysterious, coolly roaming over a hugely wide, multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary set of understandings and resources. This is as deep as topography gets, a materialising of the immaterial. It would be difficult to imagine a richer or more stirring response to the strange landscapes hidden beneath us.\
Daniel Mendelsohn
RaveThe New York Times Book Review...[a] subtle and profoundly moving book ... the book might sound dense and impossible, overladen with structural elements, but Mendelsohn’s skill as a verbal architect and manager of scenes means that this complexity is a route to revelation. Nothing is plodding here ... Homer calls Odysseus the man of 'twists and turns,' but he is also the man who knows “the minds of many men.” The two qualities are one: Indirection is the route to understanding and the shimmering, beautiful, dapple-skilled intelligence of this book, fueled by the belief that what you feel is intimate with what you know, is all the evidence of that you will ever need.
