‘Underland’ by Robert Macfarlane

In a 12-month period during which nature has emerged as an inner ‘voice of reason’; as a brightly-coloured lifebelt in a wild ocean of uncertainty, it is unsurprising that our reading has guided our thoughts into the natural world too. Our literary explorations have been as healing as our wanderings in the open air; our observation of the slow passing of the seasons; our fresh wonderment at the vivid beauty of our natural surroundings. And, yet, while our gaze has lingered on the surface of a world that seems to have re-emerged into our consciousness, it has been a book about the sub-surface that has affected us most deeply.

On one level ‘Underland’ is an exploration of places below ground level, a very practical ‘deep dive’ into worlds we are unfamiliar with and spaces many of us will never reach. But it is also an exploration of deep time; the slow, stifling darkness actually sheds light on the world in which we live in ways that it is hard to fathom.

Author Rob Macfarlane takes us under the city of Paris, deep into a world cut from the limestone that built the city on the surface; a new world exists below, a world that now represents liberté for the free-roaming urban explorers for whom it is a playground. Macfarlane takes you through tight passageways, squeezing through claustrophobic access points only metres from rumbling metro trains, into rooms where ideas like liberté, égalité and fraternité are lived realities.

From the ultra-urban to the supra-natural … the complex network of roots and fungi that communicate in the ‘wood wide web’. The richness of the ideas beautifully realised through the richness of the language the author weaves around his storytelling. It is a book for learning, but it is also a book of emotions. Ideas and scale almost beyond comprehension which somehow tunnel into your psyche. It is nigh on impossible to absorb the details of each journey Macfarlane takes but it is impossible not to be absorbed into the intention to better understand the world in which we live.

It is, for example, quite impossible to rationalise the need for Finnish engineers to create underground burial chambers for nuclear materials that the same nation’s engineers are busy creating. A world is being excavated that no human should ever discover; and if they do, the overriding challenge is one of communicating words of warning. A solution being effected for a problem of our making, to save the future world from ourselves; the perfect illustration of the opening words of this mesmeric book:

Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and long to lose, and that which we love and wish to save

‘Underland’ by Robert Macfarlane is ‘a deep time journey’ we will be making time to dive into again, all the better to mine once more the rich vein of learning we are being guided to.

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