You know a book has entered your bloodstream when the ground beneath your feet, once viewed as bedrock, suddenly becomes a roof to unknown worlds below ... If writing books is a form of making maps to guide us through new intellectual territory, Macfarlane is a cartographer of the first order ... Macfarlane’s writing is muscular, meticulously researched and lyrical, placing him in the lineage of Peter Matthiessen, Gretel Ehrlich and Barry Lopez. What distinguishes his work is his beginner’s mind, his lack of self-consciousness, his physical pursuit of unlearning what he has been taught by received information ... Underland is a book of dares. Macfarlane dares to go deep into earth’s unseen world and illuminate what we not only shy away from but what we don’t even know exists ... Underland is a portal of light in dark times. I needed this book of beauty below to balance the pain we’re witnessing aboveground.
Robert Macfarlane’s remarkable Underland: A Deep Time Journey celebrates an ambivalent love affair with the subterranean ... Grounded in lightly worn scientific knowledge, it is imbued with the intensity of personal experience ... the lyrical intensity of [Macfarlane's] writing places him in a long British tradition ... Yet Macfarlane falls as easily into the American lineage of Thoreau and John Muir ... He has absorbed those influences into a rich vernacular of his own. In passages of euphoria or stress (there are many), his sentences break into verbless fragments, like splashes of color. Only rarely is the intensity of his description such that the words call attention chiefly to themselves ... Macfarlane is gifted with qualities often mutually exclusive: the physical hardiness of travel, the sensitivity to evoke it, and a talent for scientific elucidation. Literary and classical learning cohabit with the interpretation of nuclear fission and trace fossils. At times his writing ascends to a kind of forensic poetry. Although he chronicles to devastating effect the onslaught of our species on the planet, Underland goes far beyond the normal lament of a sensitive ecologist. The visionary perspectives that he evokes, earned from his own hard journeys, create a fusion of exhilaration, foreboding, and enchantment. Underland may be his masterpiece.
Built on an epic scale, and delivered with a beautifully eloquent and sensitive language, this is a book of underground temples, catacombs, the underworld of myth, of root-systems, and submerged rivers ... this is not a stale book of non-fiction: rather, it is an account of adventure, terror, discovery and hope. In fact, this is a plea for the world seen in mythic proportions – it is compulsive, and human ... Combining a wish 'for a language that recognises and advances the animacy of the world' with an engaged and often humorous vision of the interconnectedness of things, this is a book of deep wisdom and touching humanity.
There’s a bit of John Muir and John McPhee, patient writers and naturalists both, in Macfarlane’s work. Is he a young fogey? Sometimes. He can ladle on that BBC/PBS gently-eat-your-peas earth-show narration ... Yet there’s a bit of Geoff Dyer, of the critical wildcat, in him. There’s the prickling sense, reading Macfarlane like Dyer, that a library door or a manhole cover or a bosky path might lead you not just to the end of a chapter but to a drugs party or a rave ... Macfarlane’s writing can be humid ... More often it is superb. He is so good at what he does, and has won so many awards for his books, that there has begun to be pushback in England, just to keep his career in perspective ... this is an excellent book — fearless and subtle, empathic and strange. It is the product of real attention and tongue-and-groove workmanship.
...[a] masterly and mesmerising exploration of the world below us... We exit, utterly, beautifully changed ... Underland is rich with echoes of [earlier] works. It’s as if, deep within the ancient rock, Macfarlane is gaining perspective not only on time and nature, but also on his own literary career ... At one point, a taciturn potholer in the Carso, Sergio, offers up a halting explanation of why he seeks to map the underland: 'Here in the abyss we make… romantic science.' It’s a fitting description of this extraordinary book, at once learned and readable, thrilling and beautifully written.
Macfarlane is often an engaging companion, sounding off about new scientific theories, or amazing me with his ability to thread together disparate facts to reach startling conclusions ... Unfortunately, when it comes to describing the places he traverses Macfarlane is let down by the quality of his prose. In attempting to describe everything he veers dangerously close to describing nothing ... It is hit-and-miss whether Macfarlane pulls some poetic synthesis of imagination and fact or an ill-formed semi-profundity out of his hat each time he halts to ponder ... It’s a shame Macfarlane doesn’t follow the example of one of his heroes, the Victorian nature writer Richard Jefferies, and leave himself out of the frame a bit more. I admire his values and his gusto but find his company wearying over the long haul.
Macfarlane explores subterranean spaces with the yearning of a man who feels awe ... Action sequences mean the pages of Underland fly fast. At times though, the bigger reward is to allow Macfarlane's words slow passage across the mind ... The beauty is immense — of the writing and of the natural world it describes ... becomes a glittering invitation to explore [Macfarlane's] previous nature books ... Reading Macfarlane connects us to dazzling new worlds. It's a connection that brings, more than anything else, joy. And that joy in turn connects us to the artists who depicted, thousands of years ago, dancing red figures in Norway's caves.
... mesmerizing ... Blend[s] classic stories of descent into the underworld with his own lucid stories of his experiences in geologic time ... As Macfarlane descends through some of these narrow passages in search of enlightenment, we often hold our breath and feel our hearts racing, but when he emerges we see with him the beauty of the world beneath our feet.
Underland tunnels into biology, history, physics, glaciology, and eco-poetry, among other specialties, as Macfarlane visits with scientists, archaeologists, explorers, and activists at different sites across the Northern Hemisphere. Yet the organizing force in this book turns out to be not freedom but claustrophobia ... The themes of captivity and claustrophobia point the reader toward Macfarlane’s overarching subject: how to live in a world of collapsing horizons. For much of Underland, we are made aware of existing inside a capricious nature that is, now more than ever, of human making ... Encounters with these exhuming and liquidating geological forces offer an opportunity to conceive of the 'deep time' of the book’s subtitle—those durations that extend far beyond individual lifetimes and intergenerational lineages ... Explorations in the underlands may inspire claustrophobia, and bring us into contact with the indelibility of human powers, but unexpectedly these spaces also refocus our attention on those who will inhabit the future—and how they will come to imagine us as they probe the traces we have left.
... a visionary map through places few of us will ever experience ... Language, Underland seems to say, is the imperfect tool for the work of the Anthropocene. But it is also what we have. Macfarlane’s language is inventive and restless, blending things wrought by people and other, grander, slower forces. It is a book in which ice sweats and stone pulses ... We surface from its pages covered in a residue of feeling, of dread, loss, tenderness, and terrible hope. This perhaps is the wild edge of Macfarlane’s ambition: to take English and use it to re-enchant our world ... a profound guide to literally feeling the Earth. Underland, from its formal inventiveness to the striking elegance of its prose, opens its readers to a new mode of perception; we see ourselves not as we are now but as the ancestors we will become. Such emotion is its own kind of argument, a way of seeing in the dark.
It’s a travelogue, one that drives into the most crepuscular corners of human existence—a big, brave book that asks the vital question of our time: are we being good ancestors for our descendants here on Earth? ... A host of...experts, including geologists and glaciologists, are roped in, yet the book avoids indulging in too much beard-stroking ... Underland can get abstract while losing itself in the dark in search of an almost Zen-like divinity. It’s beautiful nonetheless ... Macfarlane’s writing is perhaps most sure-footed above ground, however, in his familiar mountain terrain ... Underland speaks to our era’s solastalgia—our existential distress at what we’re doing to our planet. Is it a retreat underground away from the horrors of the natural world changing irreversibly around us? Yes. But it simultaneously looks at them square on, too. And it can be utterly joyful.
Few writers come as well-equipped for the subterranean task as Macfarlane ... It’s a tangled journey—part science fiction, part ancient myth—and Macfarlane narrates it elegantly. He’s a precise, tart, luminous writer, whose descriptions throw off sparks ... It’s also true that toward its middle, Underland lags a bit ... But his story gathers power as he descends into subterranean spaces linked to humanity’s grimmest moments ... a remarkable book.
There is throughout a transcendent beauty to Macfarlane’s prose, and occasional moments of epiphany and even ecstasy ... When not getting stuck himself, he regales us with tales of some of those who never returned ... But as always with Macfarlane’s books, the tales of adventures are only a takeoff point for discussions of deeper concerns ... premonitions of our present apocalyptic Anthropocene close in around Macfarlane like the shades of Hades around the backward-looking Orpheus. For this book is also about man’s almost incidental place in the world when seen from the perspective of geological time ... If fear is a constant companion on such journeys, for the reader at home there are many pleasures, most notably the armchair exploration of a far more benign landscape: the interior of Macfarlane’s magnificently well-furnished mind. For the darkly tangled path this book takes through the labyrinth of history and memory, literature and landscape, high-flown prose and underworldly observation are illuminated by Macfarlane’s inventive way with language. At its best, this has an epic, incantatory quality. There is a rare gift at work here: chiselled prose of such beauty that it can, on occasion, illuminate the darkness below ground as startlingly as a Verey light sent up into the vaults of one of Macfarlane’s subterranean stalactite cathedrals.
Mr. Macfarlane weaves, Styx-like, in and out of underworld myth and metaphor. The book is a worthy companion to the historian Simon Schama’s monumental Landscape and Memory ... Mr. Macfarlane is above all a poet, evoking place and mood with astounding economy ... his description of encountering the indescribable is gorgeous and evocative ... At times when this multivalent book feels as if it might not cohere, the power of the writing holds it together like a force field ... Mr. Macfarlane in fact seems a bit self-conscious about the narrative’s gender lopsidedness ... More disappointing, perhaps, are the pallid depictions and limited speaking parts that this virtuosic writer allots to women in his stories ... This matters because Underland is not in fact about what lies underground, or about geologic time, but about civilization ... Mr. Macfarlane’s prose is almost always enchanting, but on occasion the spell is broken.
... wide-ranging but uneven ... a worthy project, going deep, making the space beneath us come alive, and it’s one Macfarlane seems uniquely suited to dispatch with aplomb ... Macfarlane tries his best for hundreds of pages ... starts strong, and any reader familiar with Macfarlane’s prose will find that precise and underloved stash of fabulous word ... But a brittle format begins to emerge: A paragraph-long, scene-setting passage, all detail, few verbs ...It can be a gorgeous experience, to consider any one of them, but trouble lies in their accumulation ... the delicate balance between profundity and profligacy tests a reader ... Astonishingly, the previously stoic, ageless and gifted Macfarlane feels corny, too sure, unedited: Perhaps he was unchallenged, allowed to conclude just about any given episode or epiphany or joke is definitely worth sharing ... Too many times, dialogue exchanges go on too long. We feel trapped ... Considering the book as a whole, you might say that Macfarlane is best when he’s honest, humble and specific ... [an] unbelievably talented but imperfect writer.
All the secret spaces in this remarkable book offer new ways of being and relating: not only to its author, but for the fortunate reader too ... [Macfarlane's] own attitude is one of humility, of intent attention and observation, and it is impossible not to admire his willingness to put himself as deeply in the landscape as it is possible to go, often at some risk. And throughout there is the grace of his language. The poetry is in the precision, in the way he matches rhythm to place and action ... Underland is a startling and memorable book, charting invisible and vanishing worlds.
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.
One revelation provided by Underland is just how many types of subscapes there are ... the new book...is a lexical delight in its own right, a feast of terms for underground spaces ... In all his writing, but particularly strongly here, Nature provides for Macfarlane and his readers a form of religion for the godless, stirring sensations of awe, gratitude, and humbling insignificance. There is comfort too in the idea of all this weird beauty outlasting us; its imperishability offers a secular substitute for Eternity. Underland is an exhilarating read, but it’s not flawless ... There are two chapters set in Greenland that...[are] anticlimactic ... it’s here, in the frozen North, that Macfarlane most explicitly addresses what in earlier chapters had only been touched on: the limits of the written word ... For once, his mystic-materialist impulse to animate the landscape, to recognize it as a living thing and thus a relative to the human, founders in the face of its eldritch indifference.
... for all Macfarlane’s occasional self-indulgence, for all that the book is 50 pages too long, for all that it tries too hard sometimes to impress, I ended up loving it. He converted me. The author’s neverending curiosity, his lack of self-pity, his generosity of spirit, his erudition, his bravery and—when he writes directly—his clarity had me by the end ... There are simply wonderful chapters here, combining a command of natural and human history, a love of places and names, and the significant capacity to get to these places ... this is a book well worth reading, and if you’re quarrelsome, like me, worth persisting with.
[Underland] allows [MacFarlane] to continue to satisfy his taste for physical adventure while simultaneously elaborating a narrative analogy for the darkness of our era ... For the most part MacFarlane leaves this inbuilt metaphor to do its own work, rather than enmeshing us in the more obvious fields of depth-psychology, or turning his book into a mythological encyclopaedia. Nevertheless, this is his most meditative book so far and what he is at pains to make explicit here is how we are not separate from, or transcendent of, the planet we live on ... Beneath the fascinating physical adventures of Underland, the story MacFarlane tells is of how the challenges of what has become manifest in our era has forced him to become not just a nature writer but a human nature writer. We watch compelled as a landscape romantic of the old stamp faces our dark materiality as if in real time, while trying to meet the challenge of being, among other things, the father of young children ... Underland is reportage from the inscape, an emotionally grown-up document of adventure and reckoning, which renders us all vulnerable as collaborators in the creation of anthropocenic time.
The subject is simple ... The handling of it is complex and beautiful ... Parts of it...are genuinely horrific ... But then there are sublime passages ... What the book embodies rather than insists on is that although we have many metaphors for the ground beneath our feet—a kind of steadiness, firmness, stability—the underland is actually a slithery, slippery place. It confounds more than it confirms ... There has always been in Macfarlane’s work a sense of yearning for transcendence. This book is perhaps the most explicit example of this ... Macfarlane’s prose has a very conspicuous lilt to it, a use of alliteration and balanced sentences that seem to soothe and beguile, but are actually bristling with little daggers for the reader. This is a challenging book, and an astonishing one.
In Underland, Robert Macfarlane descends through abysses of rock and water, and dangles in crevasses of ice and inches along dark tunnels ... Yet the most terrifying section of the book involves nothing more perilous than a guided tour ... It is not the experience that is so frightening, but the purpose of the place and what might happen to it in the future. This is Onkalo in Finland, the world’s first facility for the final disposal of 6,500 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste ... Towards the end of Underland, [Mcfarlane] cites the Kalevala, the nineteenth-century epic poem compiled from Finnish folk tales and mythology. It tells of an underground cavern filled with potent materials that will poison air, water and all life if they are disturbed. He has 'a swift, chilling sense of the Kavevala as part of a messaging system, the warnings of which we have not heeded or even heard'. It is in such moments that Underland is at its most powerful, bringing to the surface the fears of the Anthropocene.
... in [Macfarlane's] best and most lyrical book of nature-writing since The Wild Places, humanity’s relationship with this underland is complex and contradictory ... This is not a book for claustrophobes ... [Macfarlane's] terror is not merely his; it is ancestral and primeval. Cavers and miners of the future will spot the Anthropocene as a stratified layer of plastic, which he finds strewn on beaches in the farthest points of the Lofoten Islands. His book is suffused with sadness for this.
He is a superb naturalist, who seems to have been everywhere and noticed everything ... The Macfarlane style is a kind of muscular prose-poetry that manages somehow to be at once impressionistic and precise. He uses every rhetorical device at his disposal ... he is unapologetic in his lyrical reaction to natural phenomena. A geologist shows him some quartz fragments brought up by a drill bit from bedrock under a mile of Greenland ice ... The book abounds in amazing facts, breathtaking surprises, delightful anecdotes. Here is a treasure from the trove ... But Macfarlane is no dewy-eyed tree-hugger—though what’s wrong with hugging trees?—and is acutely aware of the damage we have inflicted, and are inflicting, on the world.
As with many of the journeys here Macfarlane feels a bit nervous, and he expertly conveys his trepidation on the page — you worry how (or if) he’s going to get out — as well as his wonder at what he finds down there ... More than in previous books, Underland also cuts across scientific fields with sharpness and acuity, connecting a host of ideas from different spheres — from dark matter to ice-core science and the 'wood wide web' — and giving them poetic resonance ... There’s an earnest energy, a striving to name and place, an aptitude for rapture, which can in its very accuracy, create a slight tonal monotony, especially in the book’s third section. Sometimes Macfarlane’s descriptions merely highlight the drama of his own perfectly executed search for the right word or phrase ... But it is a style which forces a re-engagement with landscape and one’s apprehension of it ... Underland is a magnificent feat of writing, travelling and thinking that feels genuinely frontier-pushing, unsettling and exploratory.
...the book explores the relations between nature, emotion, and the human imagination – dancing between topographical description, literary criticism and anthropology in Macfarlane’s now distinctive hybrid genre of nature writing. Neither a rallying cry for action nor a despairing eulogy for nature as we knew it, Underland nonetheless asks an urgent question: Are we being good ancestors? ... Reading the book is a disorientating reflection of Macfarlane’s journey through substrata. It requires flexibility and a willingness to be surprised – not only by the startling drama of what he sees, but by the associative ways in which Macfarlane responds ... Macfarlane strikes a Dante-esque figure for the anthropogenic age ... It is underpinned by the (often very strongly felt) emotional responses of the narrator and its humour reminiscent of the self-deprecation in The Divine Comedy ... So expansive are the ideas, landscapes and timescales treated in Underland that they easily lose their contours after the book is finished – indistinct in outlines but forceful in their emotional afterlife, like a heady dream vision from Dante. Perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of Macfarlane’s particularly wide-angled approach to such an expansive topic.
...as beguiling as it is unsettling ... It’s a mammoth constellation of a book, connecting the dots between storytelling and science, questioning the difference between those things at their core, and dissecting our relationship with our planet ... On the surface, the fact that we are not separate from the world around us is entirely obvious, and yet Macfarlane writes these things with such joy and reverence that reading this book is akin to rethinking trodden paths. Re-seeing patterns. Waking up ... Some of this book truly is nail-biting stuff ... Underland as a text isn’t exactly linear. It is scattered, zooming in on tiny details, then out again to the big picture, branching like its own cave system. The chapters communicate with each other much like the Wood Wide Web, where trees whisper underground, and I found it mesmerizing.
Macfarlane is a poet with the instincts of a thriller writer, an autodidact in botany, mycology, geology and palaeontology, an ambulatory encyclopedia ... The book’s settings are various. But in all of them darkness, discomfort and danger provide the decor. Such is the intensity of Macfarlane’s prose that the negative becomes the positive, the subterranean turns into the quotidian, the creatures of the blackness just go about their routines and the exceptional is the rule ... Underland is a moral hymn to the strangeness of existence and a sharp warning not to take anything for granted.
...a marked departure from his previous passionate and lyrical descriptions of wild places ... extraordinary range and scope ... With Underland Robert Macfarlane has created a modern epic, the scope of its research clearly illustrated by the fact that the ‘Select’ bibliography runs to 17 pages. Where will he go next? It will be fascinating to find out.
...he gives each cavern and tunnel the same scholarly, poetic treatment as the prettier things above ground ... In each location, Macfarlane travels with at least one expert, and though he’s a seasoned hiker and mountain climber, he easily slips into the role of novice, learning the special techniques for maneuvering around these secret places. These relationships give the whole book a mythological feeling—a series of amiable Charons guiding our narrator across so many Rivers Styx ... the extremes of beauty and risk memorably intersect when Macfarlane is dangled deep into a radiant blue shaft inside a melting glacier, where the relationship between time and matter click into place.
Many authors would crumble under the massive amount of information found in the rocky layers of Underland’s pages, but not Macfarlane ... The terrains in the book are complicated and beautiful. Each space exists in a complexity often looked over by a humanity that wishes to fence off and categorize ... The way he chooses to contextualize his different 'underlands' is also so inclusive, it’s juicy. In one paragraph, he could be quoting ancient Arab lore, then a significant theorist in the next, and David Bowie after that ... The presence of other thinkers’ work gives Underland a bit of humility and makes it more readable ... What we decide next could change the fate of the planet. Underland may help us choose more wisely.
... [an] astonishing, keen sequel to The Old Ways... Underland masterfully and subtly argues the necessity of looking beyond our species and the Anthropocene—the present era of cataclysmic change—to dive into deep time and grasp the greater context of life on Earth ... A powerful, epic journey for anyone wondering about the world below and all around us and, perhaps more important, for those who aren’t.
...an epic, perspective-shifting exploration of this world beneath our feet. It cuts paths through science, geography, anthropology, poetry, myth and experience ... The book is a glinting ice core pulled from the earth, revealing mystery and memory just as ice reveals historical temperatures and atmospheric composition ... Underland helps us see new things without being worthy or dry. I learned about places, times and people – but I also experienced them ... Macfarlane’s thoughtful, iridescent style means the book’s cold realities catch you by surprise ... Underland is vast, cross-cutting, questioning. It offers signposts, connections. At times I had to surface for breath ... a journey; a witness; an invitation not just to protect our strange and life-giving earth but to be awed by it.
... an eye-opening, lyrical, and even moving exploration ... Macfarlane makes counterintuitive concepts fully accessible while capturing the poetry beneath the science ... Macfarlane’s rich, evocative survey enables readers to view themselves 'as part of a web... stretching over millions of years past and millions to come,' and deepen their understanding of the planet.
... an accomplished Virgil ... a gifted storyteller and poetic writer ... Wherever [Macfarlane] travels, he enhances our sense of wonder‚ which, after all, is the whole point of storytelling. A treasure all its own. Anyone who cares to ponder the world beneath our feet will find this to be an essential text.
