Macfarlane describes our relationship with the Underland with an almost spiritual reverence. He captures the imagination with his sensory descriptions in such a way that you’ll not be able to look at the ground in the same way again. Could not recommend more!

Original and unusual tales really enjoyable read

My mother is delighted with this book, a fascinating and richly written exploration of the underground natural formations of this country. Waterstones did a bad job of delivering it. I ordered a signed copy two weeks in advance of my mother’s birthday but nothing happened. Numerous weeks later I prodded Waterstones to explain why it had not been delivered. I suggested that it substitute the signed copy for an unsigned one if that was the cause of the problem. More time passed. Eventually it sent me a message saying it had cancelled the order because it couldn’t fulfil it. I then had to order an unsigned copy myself, which did arrive a while later.

I received this book in the spring of 2019, and over the months between then and now have dipped into it as one might spelunk. A line slung between each chapter and shimmied across. Macfarlane’s language was expectedly clean in its ability to convey a journey, as with his other works – but this one I felt required regular pitstops between each summit and each descent. The tagline of the book rightly pins it as ‘a deep time journey’ … and it was a journey of ten months for me. ‘Hearing stories of confinement below ground, people shift uneasily, step away, look to the light – as if worlds alone could wall them in.’ In the book, quite early on, there is a well-chosen passage from Alan Garner’s novel The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, which acted as a kind of signpost for the journey to come. It was a short paragraph, in which the character crawls through a crevice so thin they must pull themselves with their fingers beside their ears – and, like a spell, it instantly conjured claustrophobia in me. My heartrate quickened, and I felt the need to resurface immediately (although I was sitting on the couch, completely unrestrained). To experience this demonstration of language and its potency was – as a writer especially – igniting. And the book is strewn with moments like these; conjurations of excitement and of dread. It isn’t unusual for me to take my time with a book, and for the most part it was a narrative I wanted to spend deep time with – Macfarlane’s prose, his excavation of language, is always something to behold. But I do think this book was too long. I appreciated the time spent in each landscape, but I thought the underlying messages – the whole reason for visiting each impactful place – was explored and then retrodden, and retrodden. Perhaps it was the drawn-out way I chose to read it, but at times it felt a little lost. I was intrigued by most of the faces we met along the way, the stories shared, and the environmental insights … but I did wonder what the goal of the narrative really was. And by the end, had we reached it? I’m not sure. Let’s just say I don’t feel I lost anything from having put several days, sometimes weeks, between each chapter. ‘The hands of the dead press through the stone from the other side, meeting those of the living palm to palm, finger to finger …’ Underland, at its core, explores the various ways we, and nature, buries. How the earth beneath our feet preserves that which we hold dear, alongside that which terrifies us. A book that is the breath you take before the plunge, and the depths you sink to.

I have to be honest. I bought this book because I was looking for something to read on a long train journey. The cover illustration is of interlocking branches over a sunset. Neither the title “Underland” nor the sub-title “A Deep Time Journey” gave any real indication of what the book was about. And there was a tagline about entering the Underland through the riven trunk of an old ash tree. Everything suggested that it was a fantasy novel, and that it would be a fun read on a very long train journey. It is not a fantasy novel. It is a book about the author descending into the depths of the earth in various parts of the northern hemisphere to find out what is under the ground on which we tread. It is a very long book. I had one very simple problem with it. I did not see the point. This was partly because it was very difficult for me to see the connection between the various, different sections of the book, apart from the fact that each section dealt with something that is beneath our feet if we are standing in a particular part of the world. One of the questions that this book raises is a simple one: Why do we go under the land? What is our purpose? This is why the book is a deep time journey because it goes back far beyond the historical record to our first emergence as what Desmond Morris, in a famous book, called “The Naked Ape”. We went into caves for shelter from the weather and for protection from predators. Then we began to bury our dead. So, this book sets itself the task of exploring the Earth’s underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory and fact. The author explores the Underland of Europe and Greenland, visiting caves in the Mendips, a mine in Boulby in Yorkshire, Epping Forest, the catacombs of Paris, an underground river in the Carso in Italy, the Slovenian Highlands, the Lofoten Islands in Norway, glaciers in Greenland and a nuclear waste storage facility in Finland. Some of these underlands are natural, some of them are man-made. All of them require the author to be shown around by people who are experts in that particular terrain. It is difficult to see what the link between these places is, apart from the author’s obsession with going beneath the surface of the earth to find out what is underneath. Perhaps that is the only link. Perhaps I am missing something. The book is well-written. Each episode is described well. Some of the stories make you wonder about the sanity of humans. Why do people go into the catacombs of Paris (essentially sewers) so that they can party? Why do people risk their lives to find out exactly where an underground river flows between its disappearance and re-emergence? Why do people abseil into the cracks in glaciers? The answer is, because they can. But I am left with an essential question about this book. Why was it written? And I confess that I do not know the answer.