Book Review: Underland by Robert Macfarlane

UNDERLAND: A Deep Time Journey 
Robert Macfarlane
W.W. Norton
2019
496pp.

We all know there's a world under our feet - animal burrows, mines, caves, and so on. But MacFarlane, in a series of adventures in which he probes the depths and complexities of that world (or, rather, many worlds), shows us a whole new way of thinking about the earth.  

As he descends into Italian caves, salt and potash mines that reach far our under the seabed, the catacombs of Paris, and the world beneath glaciers and icecaps, he meets cavers, miners, fishermen, Arctic hunters, and the  sceintists who search for neutrinos filtered through thousanmds of feet of rock and soil. He ventures (arduously) to a cave in Norway where red-painted figures dance, to a repository in Finland meant to store atomic waste for tens of thousands of years, to bunkers and fortresses, and to underground rivers where countless explorers have perished. I count at least three points where the author came close to losing his life.  He does all this to share thoughts on the surface world as, in effect, an alien emerging from the underland, and the superb writing - often reflecting the author's effort to grapple with phenomena for which existing language is insufficient - takes the reader along. We feel his journeys as much as we read about them. 
He spends a lot of time documenting the effects of climate shange in Greenland, including the appearance of ice caves, military bases, and prehistoric ice itself from places where they were thoguht buried forever.  Two items that especially held my interest were his introduction to the astonishingly dense, varied, and interwoven network of plants and fungi beneath the forest floor and the challenges of burying nuclear waste to shield future generations (I used to work with nuclear weapons). He notes that we bury things for two reasons - to preserve them for future use or to inter them for undisturbed rest.  
This isn't a book you can speed through. The dense, multifacted tangle of facts and feelings involved in each adventure will force you to slow down and think - a lot.  MacFarlane knows the history and literature of the underland throughout human existence, and his take on it will leave you looking very differently at the ground beneath your feet.  This is original, memorable, and just a superb book in every possible sense.