Underland is a beautifully written, fascinating book packed full of stories and histories of our hidden underground worlds across the globe. Highly recommended.

An engrossing, often claustrophobic and yet always illuminating (no pun intended) investigation into the land beneath our feet, from one of the UK's greatest nature explorers.

Macfarlane's books are a real treat, he has the wonderful ability to combine love of landscape and the natural world with ruminations on the human race, the marks we make on our environment, and the way it in turn shapes our lives, all the while referring to myth, literature, and history.

This book sees Macfarlane focusing on spaces underground: the places we bury our dead, the mineral deposits we exploit, the dangerous caverns we explore, and our attitude to darkness and confinement.

Macfarlane visits busy mines, the Paris catacombs, notorious potholing and caving sites, forests with their fungal networks in the soil, ancient cave paintings, and underground rivers.

The book demonstrates the blurriness of boundaries; boundaries between light and dark, known and unknown, safety and danger, fear and wonder. I came away staggered by Macfarlane's ability to convey the elasticity or 'collapse' of time. We can experience our perceived reality and place in history yet also feel the past is within reach.

This is a worthy sequel to The Old Ways. Macfarlane has outdone himself. A book of the year, for sure

It can be so easy to get caught in the here and now of life when most of it consists of a routine path between home and work. I’ve certainly found that where day after day I take the same trains while passing by the same trees and buildings. After a while I barely notice them because I’m so fixated on looking at my phone or a book. But reading Robert Macfarlane’s “Underland” gives a radically new perspective on time and space as he describes his various journeys to subterranean landscapes. From ancient caves in England and Norway to the bottom of glaciers near Greenland to the subterranean chambers of London and Paris, Macfarlane explores terrain that few people have tread but which has always existed under our feet. In doing so he explores the concept of deep time where he can see the marks of many past centuries inscribed upon the rocks and ice hidden here. This is where resources are extracted from, bodies are buried, waste is disposed of and treasure is hidden. It’s also where scientists can detect changes to the environment and archaeologists can study the oldest traces from human history. Macfarlane recounts his experiences in these places, sympathetically describes the colourful individuals who guide him through them and meaningfully reflects on our hidden relationship to these subterranean regions.

It’s interesting how many people that he meets who either work, study or inhabit these spaces under the land have a strong sense of character. Many are devoted to a particular cause such as preserving the environment, snubbing the law to form a culture of undercity dwellers or mining resources for the good of society. It’s often just as interesting learning about his companions as it is about the underland spaces they’re exploring and Macfarlane shows what a deeply empathetic person he is in how he interacts with them and recounts their perspectives. One of the most compelling people he meets is a boisterous and fiercely independent fisherman named Bjornar who lives on a remote island in Norway. He’s the descendent of generations of such men and this deeply entwined relationship with the sea and landscape have given him a deep understanding of this environment far more meaningful than the oil companies scanning it for resources and the environmental impact of extracting them. I appreciate how Macfarlane gives voice to a plethora of points of view showing how battles over the land are such a complex social issue. However, the crisis of climate change is made absolute clear in the transforming landscapes he explores.

What elevates Macfarlane’s account above a standard travelogue is the beautifully poetic language he uses to evoke these varied subterranean spaces as well as his own state of being when passing through them. He also makes poignant connections referencing different poetry, novels and music so the book functions as a way to philosophically define our relationship to the natural world. But it never comes across as pretentious as he frequently feels humbled by what he finds. In fact, there are points where language is utterly defeated because it cannot describe what he’s seeing such as the glacial ice in Greenland: “Here was a region where matter drove language aside. Ice left language beached. The object refused its profile. Ice would not mean, nor would rock or light... a terrain that could not be communicated in human terms or forms.” This book gives a powerful sense of being humbled before the vast expanse of our world’s history and invites the reader to recall our part within it.

Thank you - we featured Underland on Caboodle (website and newsletter) in 2019! We look forward to working with you in 2020.

The first thing that attracted me to this book was its gorgeous cover, yes, I'm that shallow.  The second thing was its outstanding reviews on Goodreads.  At the time of writing it had 38 ratings and an overall score of 4.42, which is huge.  It deserves it too.  As I am utterly slack with getting this review published (I blame a blogging slump). It was published six months ago it still has a high score of 4.32 with over 1500 ratings so I am not the only one to be blown away by it.   And the experts love it too.  It has won the 2019 Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize,  and has been named one of the best books of the 21st Century (well the first 19 years anyway) by the Guardian Newspaper.

It is not a long book if you discount the good chunk of references at the back, but it is a dense read.  It took me over two months and is not something to be raced through.  Mr McFarlane has a command of the English language that many novelists would envy, he can describe a scene in such detail that there is really no need to get wet filthy and cold and descend underground into the many spaces under the surface.

I have been caving, many years ago and I found it quite claustrophobic, cold, wet, uncomfortable and very hard on the knees. After all this discomfort the rewards are seemingly extraterrestrial places.   This book transports you to the other world without having to leave the sofa.  Armchair caving, the perfect new sport.

He does bring his politics into this book quite a lot, and the overall theme is that global warming is happening, and the consequences on the planet are already apparent.  And that in many ways we aren't being very good ancestors.  There are several chapters near the end where he spends time up in Greenland climbing down into a tunnel into the glacier formed by meltwater.

My favourite chapter was about the Paris catacombs.  The vision of seeing strange-looking people dressed in waders wandering through the city heading for a way down.  It appears that there is literally an underground to that city which is populated with counterculture folks.

This is a wonderful exploration of all things under our feet, caves, catacombs, mines, and more.  It is a long slow read to be savoured and the writing is beautiful.

4.5 stars

In Underland Robert MacFarlane explores every kind of underground space and network. There is so much in this book, it takes a while to read it's so full of information and beautiful language. The journeys are fascinating and often difficult. This book deals with uncomfortable scenarios - recognising what we are about to lose, how close those losses actually are as well as the physical challenges of cold, of hard travelling, and movong about the Underland. More than once I had to put this book down and remind myself I wasn't actually underground, and even Robert has a moment in the Paris catacombs; In the approach to the Salle du Drapeau he describes waiting to follow Lina, the guide, into "...a tiny floor level opening perhaps eighteen inches high, where I thought the tunnel ended. My heart shivers fast, and my mouth dries up instantly. I do not want to enter that opening". Neither did I - I had a feeling of dread even in the reading of it, but in we went anyway (everything was ok).

It's not all clambering in caves and the like - though there is quite a bit of that. MacFarlane also examines the Underland of the forest and the glacier, even the sea. I loved the chapter in Epping Forest with Merlin. I'm utterly fascinated by trees and the amazing things we continue to discover about them; that they communicate with each other, even go to sleep and wake at the same time, they can send immune signalling compounds to each other. The trees are a "super-organism" and the forest is a community of everything, all dependent on each other; fungi, flora and fauna, humans. Humans, though many prefer not to think so, are part of it, not apart from it. Some may say they feel watched in a wood, that it's creepy, but I like to think - as the Koyukon people referenced here do - that I'm being being watched over, not spied on.

The other thing I love about a forest is you can feel you're in the Underland even when you're not. I'll still get inside a hollow tree if I can, or little clearing bound by trees and shrubs, and just stand there, quietly being part of it all. This is a recurring theme - the people Macfarlane spends time with, who explain the Underland to him, are deeply connected to thier world - from the scientists studying dark matter deep under Yorkshire to Bjornar Nicolaisen fighting to protect the fjord from deep drilling oil extraction - all have a deep (no pun intended) understanding of the importance of these largely hidden under- places. Many of them are in danger, and need to be fought for before they are catastrophically gone - particularly forest and sea, and most alarmingly of the deep ice.

A fascinating delve beneath the earth's crust, as Macfarlane takes you on a journey to one of the less documented parts of the world. This is a deeply (no pun intended) (oh maybe a little one then) researched and detailed exploration of the world beneath our feet - from the macabre catacombs under the streets of Paris, to adventures in speleology and pot-holing (including some tragic cautionary tales), and with two very telling looks at our future - the seed bank deep beneath the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard to ensure mankind's future, to the Onkalo nuclear waste dump being constructed beneath Finland and how to warn future generations that it's not some Tutankhamun-esque chamber filled with historical riches to behold, but is a highly toxic death cavern.
This is an incredible thought-provoking book, that really highlights how we take for granted the very ground we walk on, and largely ignore the hidden treasures that lurk beneath our daily existence. Hugely recommended.

An excellent continuation of MacFarlane’s mapping of both real and psycho-geographic spaces, this time sub-terranean. Adds wonderfully to what will ultimately be a completely unique interactive history. Hard to imagine what might be next but very much looking forward to it. Thanks to NetGalley for this advance reading copy, in exchange for an honest review.

The cover of this book drew me to it, then the description drew me in a bit more.

Once I had it in my hands, I initially found the start a bit slow. The style was not something I was used to. I persevered and was taken on a journey to worlds below ground.

Each one had a narrative to describe feelings, facts and fear. The fear not necessarily from the author - I am not one for being closed in, I need the wide open spaces of the great beyond.

The reader will find a great deal of information in this book, I give you the nearest example to me, Boulby Mine. I knew of its existence and its purpose, but not in the detail given in the book.

This is a book to read, ponder and read again.

I will come back to this book and dip in again I think. I like to ponder!

I think Underland is not the sort of book I would generally pick up and it’s a pity that I wouldn’t. This book is both magical and haunting at once, the claustrophobia you can feel is as real as if you were trapped in a cave all alone. I don’t think I have ever read something like this and sure it might not have felt as the best start (because the writing does take a bit to get used to) but trust me when I say that this is something everyone should be reading.

I am a dreamer of long travels across the globe and I wish I was half as well-travelled as the author because the sort of feelings this book brought out in me can only be explained as a sort of envy mixed in with relief. I doubt I would ever brave the underground as he fearlessly seems to do, this is something I wish I could experience but also I am glad that I haven’t, if that makes any sense at all. (I doubt it really does.)

The writing is exquisite and just so damn engaging. I had a rough week while I was reading this, didn’t get enough time to read it at a long stretch but trust me when I say that I savoured each and every minute I got to read more of this. The way he talks about certain places holding memories made me think of where I live and what sort of things the earth has seen in its long life. I am not really the sort to think of things like that so when I did, I had a few uncomfortable feelings. Of the good kind, I suppose.

This book doesn’t just talk about the sort of mark humans are leaving behind but it also makes us question what are we leaving behind individually? I rarely think of something like that so when this book made me think of that, I was glad. The writing is sublime, the topics pretty hard and a bit scary and sad but at the end, you are left with this wonder and hope that’s hard to explain.

I am so grateful that NetGalley and Penguin Books UK granted me approve to read this ahead of its publication, unfortunately due to real life, this got pushed forward.

<blockquote>The same three tasks recur across cultures and epochs: to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful... Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save. [loc. 113]</blockquote>

Macfarlane's epic journey to the 'underland' -- the places beneath the earth -- is formed of three parts: 'Seeing' (caves, forests and a dark-matter research facility, all in England);'Hiding' (catacombs, underground rivers and the caves and fissures of karst uplands, in Europe); and 'Haunting' (cave paintings, undersea oil extraction, glaciers and a nuclear waste depository, all in 'the North'). One certainly gets the sense that the author, an experienced caver and mountaineer, is pushing his own physical limits at times.

But he is not, or not primarily, a scientist. He's given to poetic pronouncements, such as (speaking of sand-grains, once wind-smoothed in a desert, retrieved from beneath a glacier) he describes them as 'desert diamonds from the bottom of the world.' 'I can tell you’re not a scientist,' says his companion. Macfarlane, though, does have a keen understanding and an eye for significant detail. Throughout his explorations, he finds the right people to talk to, and these often <u>are</u> scientists: a mycologist describing the intricate network of fungi that connect the trees in Epping Forest, a physicist in search of dark matter 'shielded from the surface by 3,000 feet of halite, gypsum, dolomite, mudstone, siltstone, sandstone, clay and topsoil'.

<i>Underland</i> is full of myth and literature, too, from the Mithraic cults and katabases (descents underground) of pre-Christian religions to the claustrophobic explorations in Alan Garner's <i>The Weirdstone of Brisingamen</i>. (Personally, Garner's description of getting stuck in a narrow tunnel beneath Alderley Edge, horrified me so much that the chances of my willingly going caving are microscopically low.) Macfarlane is eclectic: Philip Larkin ('what will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207'), Greek tragedy, the Kalevala, Ursula Le Guin, Jules Verne ... And the connections are not limited to the claustrophobia (or claustrophilia?) of the underland: Macfarlane ranges through the sense of disconnection experienced by those who see their familiar landscapes destroyed, the urge towards art -- cave paintings, friezes of bone, sculpture -- underground, the 'past pain and present beauty' of former war-zones, the way that time seems to work differently when one is hidden from the sun.

The cover design is splendid. Like Macfarlane, I thought it showed a bright sunset at the end of a country lane. No, says the artist. "[It] isn't the sun. It's the last thing you'd ever see. It's the light of a nuclear blast that has just detonated, seen down a holloway. When you look at Nether, you've got about 0.001 of a second of life remaining, before the flesh is melted from your bones."

Because running through <i>Underland</i> is the urgent message that we are wrecking the world: that the nuclear waste and the proofs of genocide will surface, the abandoned diggers beneath the North Sea and the concrete-entombed body of a dead caver will outlast us, the glaciers -- retreating faster than satellite mapping can follow -- will unbury their burdens of ancient ice and forgotten corpses.

That <i>Underland</i> succeeds in being a beautiful and erudite description of what lies beneath us, as well as a discourse on climate change, ecological catastrophe and human suffering, seems to me a triumph. Even when I was reading about topics that distressed or angered me, I was enjoying the prose. True, Macfarlane does occasionally stumble on that thin line between 'poetic' and 'flaky', but he's so sincere that I didn't balk much at sentences such as 'I'd like to die and be reborn as a boulder here'. And his prose is immensely evocative and often moving: there's a description of a chunk of black ice calving from a glacier that is spectacularly immediate.

<i>Underland</i> flickers from reports of conversations with the people who know these places best -- cavers, ecological activists, cataphiles -- to passages that feel like simple transcriptions of notes scribbled 'on site', the author's stream-of-consciousness narrative of what he is experiencing. It's not just darkness and silence, not just doom and gloom: there is fascination, appreciation of beauty, and a real joy in his surroundings. I almost want to go caving. Almost.

I am extremely grateful to NetGalley for providing a free review copy in exchange for this honest review.

I love literature about mountains, nature, woodland, wilderness and all things outdoors so Robert Macfarlane is the ultimate author for me. However when I saw this was about the world beneath our feet, I thought this might be the book to stop the love affair. How wrong I was. It was thoroughly intriguing and makes me long to explore catacombs in Paris, mines in Wales and cave art in Norway. Beautifully written and wonderfully researched, it is a book I shall return to time and again. I feel like the scales have fallen from my eyes and have come out the other side of it with a different perspective on what is literally happening beneath us every day. As well as a huge reading list! Brilliant stuff.

This was a bit of a hodgepodge for me; that it’s exceptionally written goes without saying, but I’m not sure Macfarlane succeeds in bringing together all of his wildly different subterranean topics: mining, caving, burial chambers, the study of dark matter, radioactive waste, tree communication networks, Parisian catacombs, the mythical rivers of the underworld, prehistoric cave paintings, resistance to oil drilling, Greenland’s glaciers and Finland’s tunnels, and more.

There’s no getting away from it: Robert McFarlane’s Underland is a book as rich and complex as the underground world it describes.

In many ways it’s an extraordinary book, a fascinating exploration of what lies beneath out feet. Some of the world he explores is man-made, some of it is natural; some of it is good and some of it quivering with evil like a Bond villain’s lair.

“From the vast below-ground mycelial networks by which trees communicate, to the ice-blue depths of glacial moulins, and from North Yorkshire to the Lofoten Islands,” says the blurb, “he traces an uncharted, deep-time voyage. Underland a thrilling new chapter in Macfarlane's long-term exploration of the relations of landscape and the human heart.”

I loved it. I’m a fan of nature writing at the best of times, though sometimes it can be a bit slow. There are a couple of Macfarlane’s other books that I haven’t quite finished — not because they aren’t good but in much the same way as it’s sometimes hard to finish an incredibly rich dessert, so rich that you just can’t manage to eat any more, no matter how much you want to.

Underland doesn't fall into this trap, largely because the worlds he describes are so powerful in themselves. He visits some worlds I’ve heard of and others I had no idea existed. He looks at cave paintings and the crazy urban life of the explorers of the Parisian catacombs, he goes scrambling down crevasses in melting glaciers and into mines and cave systems.

There are, admittedly, one or two places where the writing felt a little pretentious and I really wanted him to stop listening to the sound of his own voice and get on with the plot (because although it’s non-fiction it definitely had the power of a story). But overall it’s a compelling read and I would recommend it to anyone.

Thanks to Netgalley and Penguin Books for a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

As ever Macfarlane’s nature writing is sublime and you get a real sense of the beautiful places he is visiting and the fascinating characters along the way.

For me I found that it was best to take this book in small chunks as there is a lot to take in, in every chapter.

This was a fantastic nature read for me. I'm in awe of the writer. Wonderful stories about the subterrenean world, that I would never imagine existed, or a writer can write in such a compelling way.

If you love nature, nature writing, or even to clear your mind and read something completely different, I'd highly recommend this book.

Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for this copy in exchange for an honest review.

Award-winning and bestselling author Robert Macfarlane is back with a stunning story of landscape, nature, people and place and the accompanying history. Mr Macfarlane captures your attention rapidly with the interesting, information-rich text describing places lots of people will have no knowledge of. The author manages the fine balance between introducing us to enough information so that we are intrigued and suitably engaged but not so much that you become bored and drift away. That's no easy feat.

This time we follow him on an adventure to learn about those secret often unmapped places beneath our feet. I found it quite profound and nothing short of beguiling. Anyone who enjoyed Macfarlane's other nonfiction will find more the same to admire here. That said, I think this is his best and most informative book yet. It is also written in a fashion that seems accessible and understandable to everyone. The subterranean landscape he explores is so unique and fascinating and the folktales and mythology introduced make this a mysterious read. This is science and nature reporting at its very best. Many thanks to Hamish Hamilton for an ARC.

Thanks to Penguin Books UK and NetGalley for the Advance Review Copy in exchange for an honest review.

What a wonderful book! Gorgeously written, evocative, enthralling, sumptuous... how many positive adjectives can I use to describe this? Quite simply, this is the kind of book I want to buy for everyone I know.

Essentially this book is about the “Underland” and our relationship with it, the underland being what is underneath our feet. There are multiple Geologists in my family, I don’t know why, maybe it’s a Highland thing, and I must confess to never being particularly enthralled when conversation moves onto talking about rocks and suchlike. This book is so much more than that however, it contains reflections on the intersections between humanity and nature, life and death, philosophy, archaeology, history, science, myth….How does it fit all that in? Well I dunno, but it manages to.

It almost felt like a travel book to the underlandwith some of the environments explored including underground bunkers and scientific facilities, fungi networks, catacombs, barrows, forgotten underground structures, caves and and burial sites, amongst others. I particularly enjoyed the explorations around burial sites and the Paris catacombs in particular. I had a great deal of respect for the author being ballsy enough to squeeze himself into these claustrophobic situations, and I enjoyed reading about the urban explorers and ‘cataphiles’ he came into contact with. It was fun to live vicariously through events I would never dream of countenancing myself (Mammoth Cave was enough for me, thanks). I also particularly enjoyed the links to both ancient and more recent history, and how that interweaves with our experiences and understandings of the underland. I wasn’t super in love with the fungi/wood wide web chapter but that’s just my own personal preference.

Overall, this book was what I’d call a 6 star book. They don’t come along very often but you should snap them up when they do.

My thanks to Penguin Books U.K. for an eARC via NetGalley of Robert Macfarlane’s ‘Underland: a Deep Time Journey’ in exchange for an honest review.

Robert Macfarlane takes us on a journey into the worlds beneath our feet. He travels to various locations throughout the world recording his experiences and impressions in notebooks.

Among the many areas covered within ‘Underland’ are: the underground networks of trees (wood wide web), dark matter experiments, undercities and catacombs, urban explorers, starless rivers, caves and sacred sites, ancient and recent history, burial rites, rock art, natural and unnatural disasters (many heartbreaking to read), hollow Earth stories, ice-core science, chambers cut into the earth to house radioactive waste (with warnings for future generations to not investigate).

There is also a fair amount about climate change and the Anthropocene, the name for our current epoch of immense and often frightening change on a planetary scale.

Macfarlane incorporates many anecdotes of his travels in a poetic style that proved very readable. In his travels he connects with fascinating, eccentric people. This is nature and science writing at its finest.

This book was guaranteed to be a good fit for me. Since childhood I have been drawn to myths, legends and stories about the underworld whether it be multiple readings of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alan Garner’s Alderley Edge series and exploring myths such as the descent of Ishtar, the Eleusinian Mysteries and Arthur’s raid upon the Celtic Underworld.

I am now very keen to read Macfarlane’s other works on landscape. ‘Underland’ is one that I will buy in hardback in order to savour it again at a more leisurely pace.