Disturbing, eye-opening, puzzling, Underland is not a comfortable book, and one wonders what possessed Robert Macfarlane to go to the lengths he did in order to write it. Sub-titled A Deep Time Journey, it's an exploration and examination of what lies beneath our feet seen through a variety of lenses: historical, political, geological, ecological, geographical, and cultural. It's personal, too, as Macfarlane records his own impressions and experiences of the landscapes he visits in order to map so-called 'deep time'. Parts of it are fascinating, others less gripping, but it does open the subterrane in unexpected ways and in so doing it opens the mind.
"Over field and down into bower of elder and old ash, moss pushing rock to soft gold-green. Follow the stream through gorse and bracken, setting fieldfares flaring to the west with chatter and crackle. Swallows skimming meadows on the fly, blowy warmth in a north-east wind. On and into the deep-set hollow, a last nod to the sun - to the light falling through leaves in nets, to the buzzard drifting over - and then we are down a hole in the stone-cold soil, worn to a swallet by the run of a stream, into the earth's gullet, into the black bite of a polished stone-vice set carelessly and wondrously with the spirals of ammonites and the bullets of belemnites, and down into trouble."
Pot-holing in the Mendips, driving miles under the sea through the tunnels of a salt and potash mine in Yorkshire, learning about arboreal communication and support systems in Epping Forest, Macfarlane's travels take him to a range of environments, often hostile, sometimes deadly. In Italy and Slovenia he discovers beauty coupled with atrocity; in Paris a bizarre subculture of urban exploration beneath the city; in Norway prehistoric cave paintings on a virtually inaccessible coast, but wherever he is there's a palpable heart of darkness, a threat to life - or civilisation - whether natural or man-made, and the reader cannot remain unaffected.
As if in subtle emphasis to this waiting doom, Macfarlane takes with him on his travels two objects: one an amulet to guide him in the dark, the other a repository of another man's demons - hatred, fears, loss and pain recorded on paper then burnt and encased in bronze, this to be disposed of in "the deepest or most secure underland site I reached - a place from which it could never return."
Burial is of course a theme of the book, whether deliberate or accidental, vitally necessary - as in the case of nuclear waste - or a matter of tradition and convention. Macfarlane highlights "our species' instinct to open what has been sealed without thought for the consequences" and observes that with the rise in global temperatures "troublesome history thought long since entombed is emerging again." What is buried does not disappear.
The book's stylistic quirks - the sectional tense-changing, use of the historic present, the settings sketched in note form (a terse, alliterative position-plotting) - might grate or charm according to taste, but that signature doesn't diminish the work's scope, the depth of research which informs it, the overall strength of the narrative, and the impact it must have on any reader. Whatever caused Robert Macfarlane to venture into the underworld, he has returned to the surface with wisdom born of observation and an urgent and eloquent call to conscience.
