Underland is, at its simplest, a series of accounts of literal descents which tell us much about how underworlds have both defined and eluded us, at once bearing the marks of our influence on the earth’s geology and revealing how much of its below-surface systems we do not understand. Across millennia, we have ventured below the earth’s surface in order to preserve what is precious for posterity and dispose of what is harmful. In order to answer this, Underland suggests, we have to understand our relation to the ‘worlds beneath our feet’ of which we know so little. Neither a rallying cry for action nor a despairing eulogy for nature as we knew it, Underland nonetheless asks an urgent question: Are we being good ancestors? Like The Old Ways, to which Underland is a long-awaited sequel, the book explores the relations between nature, emotion, and the human imagination – dancing between topographical description, literary criticism and anthropology in Macfarlane’s now distinctive hybrid genre of nature writing. Macfarlane’s latest work of literary and imaginative journeying, Underland, might be thought of as just such a ‘detailed thinking through’. There are also good reasons to be sceptical of the Anthropocene’s absolutism But the Anthropocene is a massively forceful concept, and as such it bears detailed thinking through. There are good reasons to be sceptical of the epitaphic impulse to declare “the end of nature”. In a 2016 Guardian article examining the rise of the Anthropocene as a concept outlining an era of irreversible, human-driven ecological change – and what it means for writers and cultural thinkers – Robert Macfarlane laid bare his ambivalence towards this narrative: Like Dante descending into the underworld, we are told the doors of hell are shutting behind us and that all hope must be left behind. If the possibility of an alternative future ever existed (and some claim it never did), then now it must be foregone. How should writers respond to the ecological crisis? Both ‘crisis’ and the much-contested term ‘Anthropocene’ appear to bring us to the brink: there is, they tell us, no return to a state of innocence. Underland, Robert Macfarlane, Hamish Hamilton, 2019, 496 pp, £20.00 (hardback)
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