Underland

Underland by Robert McFarlane

Early in my reading of Robert McFarlane’s Underland I decided to approach the book more as a book-length, non-fiction prose poem than as a standard work of “science writing” or “nature writing.” This not only made it easier to revel in (rather than roll my eyes a little at) McFarlane’s gushing, sometimes unctuous prose; it also felt truer. Underland is an extended lovesong and dirge to the Earth and its many landscapes, both above and below ground.

In three “chambers,” McFarlane explores three recurring strands of human interaction with the underland: seeing, hiding, and haunting. Over the course of these chambers, McFarlane explores the catacombs of Paris, the understorey of Epping Forest, the Carso of Slovenian/Italian borderland, and the seas, caves, and glaciers of Norway and Greenland, among other places. While McFarlane’s choice of exploration locations makes this a literally Eurocentric read, I found this choice less troubling than the idea of an alternative where White, British McFarlane traipsed through non-European locales, bringing back wonder tales as if he were the first to know them. Indeed, McFarlane largely avoids any sense of being a “discoverer,” positioning himself instead more as an alternately adventurous and trepidatious pal along for the journey, always awestruck. Through the slightly affected innocence of this positioning, the experts and friends, activists and acquaintances who guide McFarlane on his way are allowed to step forward into the limelight and, even more than they, the landscape itself.

Arguing that most of us who dwell on Earth little consider the underland—be that mines, caves, or underground rivers, cores of ice, catacombs, or the shape of land beneath the sea, this book is an enchanting exploration of these literal spaces. It is also more philosophical, ruminating on how these deep spaces are formed and informed by “deep time,” time on a scale inconceivable by most humans. Reading of deep time—realizing we all still exist with in it—made me feel small, awed, grateful, and crushed as Underland turned, inevitably and necessarily, to our own slice of deep time. McFarlane writes of “plastiglomerate—a hard coagulate that contains sand grain, shells, wood, and seaweed, all held together by molten plastic produced by the human burning of beach rubbing on campfires….First identified by geologists on Kamilo Beach in Hawaii[,] it has been proposed…as a plausible future Anthropocene strata horizon marker” (320).

There’s no way to escape thinking about climate change and the Anthropocene, nor should there be. Someday, the world we inhabit will be another world’s underland. So even if this soaring, plunging, gushing read was at times almost cheesy in its passion for Earth, I can’t help but be grateful to have read it and traveled in my mind and come to understand my home a little better before it is destroyed.