Underland: A Deep Time Journey
Robert Macfarlane
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Underland: A Deep Time Journey
Robert Macfarlane
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
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.
Robert Macfarlane’s remarkable Underland: A Deep Time Journey celebrates an ambivalent love affair with the subterranean.
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.
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.
...[a] masterly and mesmerising exploration of the world below us... We exit, utterly, beautifully changed.
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.
Macfarlane explores subterranean spaces with the yearning of a man who feels awe.
... mesmerizing.
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.
... a visionary map through places few of us will ever experience.
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?.
Few writers come as well-equipped for the subterranean task as Macfarlane.
There is throughout a transcendent beauty to Macfarlane’s prose, and occasional moments of epiphany and even ecstasy.
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.
... wide-ranging but uneven.
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.
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.
One revelation provided by Underland is just how many types of subscapes there are.
... 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.
[Underland] allows [MacFarlane] to continue to satisfy his taste for physical adventure while simultaneously elaborating a narrative analogy for the darkness of our era.
The subject is simple.
In Underland, Robert Macfarlane descends through abysses of rock and water, and dangles in crevasses of ice and inches along dark tunnels.
... 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.
He is a superb naturalist, who seems to have been everywhere and noticed everything.
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.
...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?.
...as beguiling as it is unsettling.
Macfarlane is a poet with the instincts of a thriller writer, an autodidact in botany, mycology, geology and palaeontology, an ambulatory encyclopedia.
...a marked departure from his previous passionate and lyrical descriptions of wild places.
...he gives each cavern and tunnel the same scholarly, poetic treatment as the prettier things above ground.
Many authors would crumble under the massive amount of information found in the rocky layers of Underland’s pages, but not Macfarlane.
... [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.
...an epic, perspective-shifting exploration of this world beneath our feet. It cuts paths through science, geography, anthropology, poetry, myth and experience.
... an eye-opening, lyrical, and even moving exploration.
... an accomplished Virgil.