Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane

Overview

National Bestseller • New York Times "100 Notable Books of the Year" • NPR "Favorite Books of 2019" • Guardian "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" • Kirkus Reviews "Best Books of the 21st Century (So Far)" • Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award

"Mesmerizing…Underland is a portal of light in dark times." —Terry Tempest Williams, New York Times Book Review

In Underland, Robert Macfarlane delivers an epic exploration of the Earth’s underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself. Traveling through the dizzying expanse of geologic time—from prehistoric art in Norwegian sea caves, to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, to a deep-sunk "hiding place" where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come—Underland takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind.

Global in its geography and written with great lyricism, Underland speaks powerfully to our present moment. At once ancient and urgent, this is a book that will change the way you see the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393358094
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/18/2020
Pages:	496
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Robert Macfarlane is internationally renowned for his writing on nature, people, and place. His best-selling books include Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places, and Mountains of the Mind; they have been translated into more than thirty languages, won many prizes around the world and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio, and dance. He has also written operas, plays, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe. He has collaborated with artists including Olafur Eliasson and Stanley Donwood, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally best-selling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. He is the recipient of the E. M. Forster Prize for Literature and the Henry David Thoreau Prize for Literary Excellence. Macfarlane lives in Cambridge, England, where he is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Table of Contents

First Chamber 1

1 Descending 9

Part I Seeing (Britain)

2 Burial (Mendips, Somerset) 23

3 Dark Matter (Boulby, Yorkshire) 53

4 The Understorey (Epping Forest, London) 85

Second Chamber 117

Part II Hiding (Europe)

5 Invisible Cities (Paris) 127

6 Starless Rivers (The Carso, Italy) 175

7 Hollow Land (Slovenian Highlands) 211

Third Chamber 243

Part III Haunting (The North)

8 Red Dancers (Lofoten, Norway) 251

9 The Edge (Andøya, Norway) 287

10 The Blue of Time (Kulusuk, Greenland) 325

11 Meltwater (Knud Rasmussen Glacier, Greenland) 367

12 The Hiding Place (Olkituoto, Finland) 395

13 Surfacing 421

Notes 427

Select Bibliography 447

Acknowledgements 465

Index 469

Editorial Reviews

"[Macfarlane] seems to metabolize landscape into lyrics as he walks."

Outside - Rachel Riederer

"Through this series of haunting descents, Macfarlane plumbs the strange and alarming ways we’ve changed the world and resurfaces with revelations about how to orient us to the future, weaving landscape and language together."

Grist - Kate Yoder

"One of the most ambitious works of narrative non-fiction of our age."

Guardian - William Dalrymple

"[Robert Macfarlane’s] writing is luminous, intense.…[B]rilliant notes from the underground."

Nature - Huw Lewis-Jones

"The most impressive exercise of imagination and scholarship I’ve come across lately.…A reader never will forget this journey through geologic time."

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Tony Norman

"Profound in every sense of the word."

Richard Powers

"With Underland Macfarlane gives us a work of nature writing for the age—and for the ages. Its eloquent but urgent prose reveals our complex relationship with nature while pushing us to think more deeply about earth’s sublime underneath."

Gizmodo - Amy Brady

"Remarkable…Underland may be [Macfarlane’s] masterpiece."

New York Review of Books - Colin Thubron

"Reading Macfarlane connects us to dazzling new worlds. It’s a connection that brings, more than anything else, joy."

NPR - Barbara J. King

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…Underland is an epic exploration and examination of darkness and the caverns underground that have captured our imaginations, pulled us downward, housed our dead and allowed us to bury our most violent secrets. It is also a descent into the beauty where dark wisdom is located…If writing books is a form of making maps to guide us through new intellectual territory, Macfarlane is a cartographer of the first order…Macfarlane's writing is muscular, meticulously researched and lyrical, placing him in the lineage of Peter Matthiessen, Gretel Ehrlich and Barry Lopez. What distinguishes his work is his beginner's mind, his lack of self-consciousness, his physical pursuit of unlearning what he has been taught by received information.

The New York Times Book Review - Terry Tempest Williams

There's a bit of John Muir and John McPhee, patient writers and naturalists both, in Macfarlane's work…Yet there's a bit of Geoff Dyer, of the critical wildcat, in him. There's the prickling sense, reading Macfarlane like Dyer, that a library door or a manhole cover or a bosky path might lead you not just to the end of a chapter but to a drugs party or a rave…[Underland] is an excellent book—fearless and subtle, empathic and strange. It is the product of real attention and tongue-and-groove workmanship.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

★ 01/31/2019

Nature writer Macfarlane (The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot) expands readers’ horizons while delving into the various “worlds beneath our feet” in an eye-opening, lyrical, and even moving exploration. His look at the network of roots below London’s Epping Forest leads into a discussion of the recent discovery that trees share nutrients with neighboring trees that are ill or under stress, a finding consistent with new ideas about plant intelligence and a “wood wide web” of interconnected plant and fungal life. In another section, Macfarlane descends more than half a mile below the Yorkshire countryside to visit “a laboratory set into a band of translucent silver rock salt left behind by the evaporation of an epicontinental northern sea some 250 million years earlier,” where a physicist is searching for proof of dark matter’s existence. Here, too, Macfarlane makes counterintuitive concepts fully accessible while capturing the poetry beneath the science, describing the tangible world humans perceive “as mere mist and silk” in relation to dark matter. Perhaps most importantly, he places humanity’s time on Earth in a geological context, revealing how relatively insignificant it is. Macfarlane’s rich, evocative survey enables readers to view themselves “as part of a web... stretching over millions of years past and millions to come,” and deepen their understanding of the planet. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Underland is a devastating act of witness and a clear, cogent, lyrical examination of the darknesses invisible beneath our feet."

Lauren Groff

"Mesmerizing…Underland is a portal of light in dark times."

Terry Tempest Williams

"Exquisite. "

Science - Ryan J. Haupt

"Incantatory…A worthy companion to the historian Simon Schama’s monumental Landscape and Memory."

Wall Street Journal - Marcia Bjornerud

"Quietly prophetic. "

Atlantic - Jedediah Purdy

"Brilliant."

San Francisco Chronicle - Peter Fish

"Underland is a profound reckoning with humankind’s self-imperiled position in nature’s eternal order. At once thrilling and soulful, raw and erudite, it is a book of revelations."

Philip Gourevitch

Listeners will feel claustrophobic as they wend their way through this audiobook, but not because of narrator Matthew Waterson. On the contrary, Waterson’s even pacing and soft British accent make for an ideal guide. It’s the subject matter that takes us to dark, cramped spaces. In this follow-up to his previous titles on mountains and remote places, Robert Macfarlane explores our relationship with the landscape beneath the surface of our planet. In a voice attuned to the author’s lyricism and wit, Waterson leads us to man-made and natural subterranean sites where humans have ventured “to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful.” D.B. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2019 - AudioFile

Listeners will feel claustrophobic as they wend their way through this audiobook, but not because of narrator Matthew Waterson. On the contrary, Waterson’s even pacing and soft British accent make for an ideal guide. It’s the subject matter that takes us to dark, cramped spaces. In this follow-up to his previous titles on mountains and remote places, Robert Macfarlane explores our relationship with the landscape beneath the surface of our planet. In a voice attuned to the author’s lyricism and wit, Waterson leads us to man-made and natural subterranean sites where humans have ventured “to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful.” D.B. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2019 - AudioFile

★ 2019-04-10
An exploration of the little-visited realms of the Earth, from deep caves to bunkers, trenches to Bronze Age burial chambers, courtesy of an accomplished Virgil.

Macfarlane (The Lost Words, 2018, etc.), who has pretty well revived single-handedly the fine British tradition of literary natural history writing, can usually be found atop mountains. In his latest, he heads in the opposite direction, probing the depths of the Earth to find the places in which humans have invested considerable imaginative attention yet fear to tread. He opens with a cave network discovered in China's Chongqing province only a few years ago that "was found to possess its own weather system," with layers of dank cold mist that never see sunlight. From there, the author moves on to other places that require us to "go low," into places that humans usually venture only to hide things—treasure, sacred texts, bodies. Now that many such places are making themselves known, exposed during construction excavations and unveiled by melting permafrost, "things that should have stayed buried are rising up unbidden"—treasure sometimes, more often just bodies. All of this is occasion for Macfarlane, a gifted storyteller and poetic writer, to ponder what historians have called "deep time," the time that is measured in geological rather than human terms and against which the existence of our kind is but a blip. Even places well known or celebrated in antiquity—from the underworld of The Epic of Gilgamesh to the Iron Age mines of the Mendip Hills of southwestern England—are recent points on the map of that ancient landscape. As he moves from continent to continent, Macfarlane instructs us on how to see those places, laced with secrets and mysteries ("all taxonomies crumble, but fungi leave many of our fundamental categories in ruin"). Wherever he travels, he enhances our sense of wonder‚ which, after all, is the whole point of storytelling.

A treasure all its own. Anyone who cares to ponder the world beneath our feet will find this to be an essential text.

Kirkus Reviews