‘We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’
Those words from T.S. Eliot would make a fitting summary of Underland, the latest work from Robert Macfarlane, a leading figure in what is sometimes called ‘new nature writing’, one of the biggest publishing trends of the last decade or so.
On the surface, this is a book about what’s under the surface, ‘the worlds beneath our feet’, about which ‘we know so little’. Macfarlane recounts – in vivid, beautiful prose – a series of journeys underground, from cave systems in the Mendips to the catacombs under Paris and on to the glaciers of Greenland and the deep-sunk storage facilities for nuclear waste in Arctic Finland. It’s a book of explorations.
