I've waited for so long for Robert Macfarlane's Underland to come out in paperback. Several times I'd wander through bookshops in the past 18 months, longingly picking up the hardback but ultimately putting it back again. Soon, I figured.
There are many reasons for my waiting. It was a huge and heavy book. I have all of Robert's other books in paperback. I could delay the pleasure of reading his latest by working my way through his backlist first. But finally, after more than a year, here I am.
In a recent interview on Front Row, it was pointed out that Robert started his writing up in the peaks and slowly made his way down over time. From Mountains of the Mind, through The Old Ways and The Wild Places, he has finally descended into the Underland: a 'deep time journey' into the deepest, darkest recesses of the world. And I, reader, finally got to follow him down into the dark.
Descending
To me, the most gripping aspect of all of Robert's books - and especially Underland - is his ability to see through layers - of time, of rock, of soil. Travel writing, nature writing, adventure writing only really seems to work when there is more to the story than travelling in space, and with every place that Robert visits, there is a clear intention not just to see, but to understand: be that travelling in space and time, too, to Bronze Age burial rituals in Somerset; or exploring the incomprehensible, incredibly remote and powerfully strange locations that hunter-gatherer-fisher people in the Lofoten archipelago in Norway chose to decorate with cave paintings ('made in some of the harshest country in the world').
He has an ability to see with such amazement, such child-like wonder and imagination that I feel myself seeing with his eyes, too, as I read his words. His writing reawakens in me the child who believed in magic and relished the strange. He draws on the mystical, hints at the surreal: 'there by the glimmering birches is a figure standing dark on rising ground, where no figure should be'.
Although Landmarks was an ode to the joy of words, Underland puts this joy to use. It is with pure love of language that Robert scatters alliterations and musical phrases: 'Cold sleet on old slate', 'A gravel beach is reached', 'A light is struck, lifted, shifted', and this from the very first passage of the book: 'Late-summer heatwave, heavy air. Bees browsing drowsy over meadow grass. Gold of standing corn, green of fresh hay-rows, black of rooks on stubble fields.' No word carelessly placed, no rhyme or resonance accidental. This is poetry, bringing memories of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
And there, of course, is the fascination with the distant and the remote - in Underland, Robert travels across the UK to places no ordinary person would (or could, perhaps), and then heads north to Norway, Finland and Greenland, spending what feels like months on the remote fjords and glaciers, climbing unnamed peaks and descending into crevasses of deep time in the ice, playing harpoon water-polo in kayaks (as one does). He descends into deep, dark catacombs under Paris, a ghostly mirror image of the city above; and he visits a 'starless river' in the Abyss of Trebiciano. He even ventures into the underlands of Budapest. It is a true journey into deep time from the upper layers of our existence across the globe.
Ascending
Although ultimately uplifting, this is not light reading. Robert spends considerable time on exploring the threats to our existence: climate change, extinction, man-made ruin. He conveys warning messages and rings the alarm. It is not easy nor comfortable to be faced with these truths, and yet I'm incredibly grateful for it here.
I say uplifting, but it's more of a liberation, a bubbling up of raw feelings that returns again and again throughout the book. After hours spent in a glacier 'Labyrinth', 'One of us cries briefly. We all feel hunted by this ice, haunted by it'. Or here, when locating those remote, painted red dancers in Lofoten: 'Suddenly, unexpectedly, my head begins to tingle and then my back and my chest start to shake, and I find myself crying, sobs shuddering my body in the teardrop-shaped rift, far from another human and so close to these generous figures . . . I cry there, surprised and helpless, deep in granite and darkness, weeping for feelings I cannot name.'
These passages don't leave you for a long while.
There is a masterful art in the structure of this book as it builds towards its conclusion. From Descending, through the three Chambers and finally Surfacing, each section is carefully placed and named, making the reading of this book a journey in itself. Here, again, the mystical and magical is evoked, with chapter names such as The Understorey, Invisible Cities, Hollow Land and the Blue of Time. Broken into three major sections - Seeing, Hiding and Haunting - we go deeper until we make our journey back to the surface, into the security of the light.
Overall...
In Underland, unlikely as it may seem, Robert is often lost for words, feeling deeply the weakness of language compared to the majesty and all-encompassing presence of nature and the world around us. Writing this summary, or review, or call it what you may, feels that way when it comes to Robert's writing.
I urge you to read Underland if you hate the deep and the dark; if you feel claustrophobia. If you worry about the direction we're heading, but are fascinated with a constantly changing landscape. Read it for escapism, read it for a wake-up call. Just read it.
10/10
