The Lost Properties of Love: An Exhibition of Myself, by Sophie Ratcliffe
Underland: A Deep Time Journey
By Robert Macfarlane Hamish Hamilton £20
Where Macfarlane goes, we follow.
He is the Pied Piper. He was the first to lead us up to the mountain’s peak ( Mountains of the Mind) and, for 15 writing years, we have followed down tracks ( The Old Ways) and across wilderness ( The Wild Places). And now, as the Pied Piper will, he leads us into the mountain itself. Down and through we go behind him, into the place where we’ll go when we’re dead.
For Macfarlane, this is an autobiographical journey. Its logic is the logic of his life so far. He maps the lines of connection that run from the human heart outwards into landscape, confronting his sometimes fierce wish to be other than human, asking why humans fail and disappoint and why mountains always entrance. He follows these threads wherever they lead, often alone, leaning into his fear, and calling on all his native wit and self-reliance to survive.
He places himself, unidentified but clearly recognisable, at the book’s start: a boy with his father, levering up a floorboard in order to hide a time capsule.
Then he sets out. He takes us backwards through time (which in geological terms is often down) through cave complexes miles into the earth, and down mines that run far under the sea. He takes us into the quarries from which Paris was built, a kind of city in negative. He takes us where huge underground rivers flow; where our ancestors are buried, or where they have left their drawings, the imprint of their hands or their treasure.
And he brings us at last to Finland, to the repository we have dug, 1,500 feet deep, for nuclear power’s by-product, the spent uranium rods that are our own toxic and all-too-durable handprint.
What he finds in these places is, by his own admission, a surprise. Because Underland is not just underground, nor is it just the Underworld. It is both and neither; or, more precisely, it is other. It is all the things that life, as we know and experience it, is not. It is dark, cold and mineral. It is a record of how things were. It is non-human and it is dead. Or is it? Down in a seam of halite that is the ‘salt-ghost’ of a prehistoric sea, scientists of dark matter studying our origins sit watching tanks of purified water. They are waiting for evidence of the particle wind that blows everywhere and all the time, pouring through matter as though the world were nothing but mist. Our bodies, one of them explains, are as porous to it as wide-mesh nets.
Barriers dissolve. Things that seemed inert come alive and start moving. Mountains flow, rocks pulse, plants set up evolution-busting systems of mutuality, and suddenly we find we are closer-natured than we thought to rocks and stones and trees. Licking a piece of potash at a miner’s instruction, Macfarlane finds it tastes of blood.
This is a radical book in every sense. It goes as deep as it can, unafraid of the risk that what it finds will turn everything on its head. Because, in this new inside-out version of the world, the dark is the thing. We, and the lit world where we live, are just its efflorescence. As if in Plato’s cave, we find ourselves nothing more than coloured shadows.
Macfarlane is unflinching in his embrace of this: the chilly, infinite micro-mysteries of our newfound parentage. The dark is everywhere – truer, deeper, wider and throughout, in ways that we can never see and only barely imagine. The terms are oddly religious.
But if this is the result of all his searching, it is clear that light is the thing we love. The book is beautifully and bravely balanced between these oppositions. It allows us both to be exhilarated by deep time, dark matter, commonality with mycorrhiza, rocks and stars, and at the same time to treasure the short human perspective: this time, this place and these particular people. Surfacing from his underland adventures, he turns, repeatedly ecstatic, to the soft beauties of the world.
The book closes with another father and child: Macfarlane and his own son. The little boy, running ahead down a tunnel of blackthorn, is swallowed in the sun’s glare, briefly dematerialising like the shadow he really is. In this moment, we have the whole picture and it is profoundly moving.