BOOK REVIEW Book Review
UNDERLAND: A DEEP TIME JOURNEY
by Robert Macfarlane Review by John Berry, CPG-04032
Robert MacFarlane was born in 1976 in the small village of Halam, Nottinghamshire, and now lives in Cambridge, where is a fellow of Emmanuel College. Macfarlane is a mountaineer and caver and his books about the outdoors and his interaction with it (Mountaineers of the Mind (2003), The Wild Places (2007) and The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012)) have won several prizes, on both sides of the Atlantic. This latest book has been widely praised in reviews by the New York Times and the New York Review of Books, among others.
I bought the book in the hope, based on the reviews, that it would have something to say about the importance of geology, perhaps even of geologists, in human affairs, but in that I was greatly disappointed. In spite of the fact that his second chapter describes a visit to a potash mine, during which he is driven out under the North Sea, there is very little mention of geologists or of geology as a science, and no reference to our dependence on the Earth’s resources. On p. 75 he credits the invention of the term Anthropocene to an atmospheric scientist, and he spends a few pages considering what evidence of the existence of modern man will remain in the geological future (without using the word ‘Geology’) : the quote is memorable (p.76-77):
“Among the relics of the Anthropocene, therefore, will be the fall-out of our atomic age, the crushed foundations of our cities, the spines of millions of intensively farmed ungulates, and the faint outlines of some of the billions of plastic bottles we produce each year – the strata that contain them precisely dateable with reference to the product-design archives of multinationals.”
And there’s the rub: this book is about style. The author’s style of writing. Style in speleology. The life style of his informants. Style in reportage, in travel. Macfarlane has a quirk in writing style: he introduces each chapter or change of subject with a string of short, often verbless statements such as those I have just made. At first it is cute, but by the end it becomes somewhat grating. He is also a modernist: the book follows no straight timeline in the now or in the human past he
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describes, there is no consistent argument and no simple route either on the Earth’s surface or below it: we go from a Bronze Age grave in the west of England to the depths of a Potash mine in the North, to the mycorrhizal mats of Epping Forest, then to the sewers of Paris, followed by some of the deepest limestone karst and most depraved human behavior in Italy, to the Paleolithic painters of the Lofoten Islands of Norway, to the nunataks and floating glaciers of Greenland, and end in a high-level nuclear repository in Finland, with frequent reference back to what has already been said and forward to what will be said. In a way this is extremely effective in pro- ducing a gut-level feeling for what Macfarlane means by the Underland, and for the myriad ways we have interacted with it, been shaped by it, and in turn abused it. I just found myself a little uncertain for a long while as to where we were going.
Macfarlane is also a people person: the book is hung on a series of encounters with people, knowledgeable and often intrepid people through whom, and through whose encounters with nature, the stories of the Underland are told. The journey with Macfarlane is a gripping adventure, and I learned a lot, including that dire physical risk-taking for the sake of art has been a constant feature of human behavior from the dawn of the Paleolithic until today, and that spent fuel from nuclear power stations is a greater and longer-term danger than the waste from nuclear bomb manufacture.
You will enjoy this book. Speleologists, plant biologists and fisherman are all prominent characters in the story Macfarlane tells about the Underland, but we who study it seriously, and in part created much of it, are largely absent from that story.
“
The journey with Macfarlane is a gripping adventure, and I learned a lot...
Jul.Aug.Sep 2020 • TPG 35
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