Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane Narrated by Matthew Waterson

Overview

Hailed as "the great nature writer of this generation" (Wall Street Journal), Robert Macfarlane is the celebrated author of books about the intersections of the human and the natural realms. In Underland, he delivers his masterpiece: an epic exploration of the Earth's underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself.



In this highly anticipated sequel to The Old Ways, Macfarlane takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind. Traveling through "deep time"-the dizzying expanses of geologic time that stretch away from the present-he moves from the birth of the universe to a post-human future, from the prehistoric art of Norwegian sea caves to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, from Bronze Age funeral chambers to the catacomb labyrinth below Paris, and from the underground fungal networks through which trees communicate to a deep-sunk "hiding place" where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come. Woven through Macfarlane's own travels are the unforgettable stories of descents into the underland made across history by explorers, artists, cavers, divers, mourners, dreamers, and murderers, all of whom have been drawn for different reasons to seek what Cormac McCarthy calls "the awful darkness within the world."

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Terry Tempest Williams

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 - Dwight Garner

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.

From the Publisher

"Profound in every sense of the word."— Richard Powers, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory

"An excellent book—fearless and subtle, empathic and strange."— Dwight Garner New York Times

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

"Remarkable…Underland may be [Macfarlane’s] masterpiece."— Colin Thubron New York Review of Books

"One of the most ambitious works of narrative non-fiction of our age."— William Dalrymple Guardian

"[Robert Macfarlane’s] writing is luminous, intense.…[B]rilliant notes from the underground."— Huw Lewis-Jones Nature

"[Macfarlane] seems to metabolize landscape into lyrics as he walks."— Rachel Riederer Outside

"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."— Kate Yoder Grist

"The most impressive exercise of imagination and scholarship I’ve come across lately.…A reader never will forget this journey through geologic time."— Tony Norman Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"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."— Amy Brady Gizmodo

Kirkus Reviews

★ 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.

2020 ALA Carnegie Medal, Long-listed
2020 Orwell Prize, Short-listed
2019 National Outdoor Book Award, Winner
2020 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award, Winner

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171388843
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	06/25/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

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