Book Review - Underland by Robert Macfarlane

After climbing the world's tallest mountains, exploring ancient roads and finding remaining wild places in Britain, Robert Macfarlane became obsessed with life under the surface of the earth.  In this, his latest book, he travels underground, finding ancient burials, modern mines that extend for miles under the ocean, sites miles underground where nuclear waste has been buried, rivers that plunge under mountains, the miles of tunnels under the city of Paris, all dark places where sunlight never reaches.  In the Balkans, tracing an underground river, he finds that the past is never far away, and is still very much alive in peoples' hearts and memories. Deep clefts in the mountains hold the bodies of victims of mass murders committed during and between the two world wars, and there new neo-Nazi shrines have been created.  Macfarlane feels a palpable, lingering evil at these sites, where horrendous atrocities have been committed and hatred remains.  In the arctic the melting of polar ice reveals abandoned cold war bases and endangers the supposed "secure" and "safe" burials of nuclear waste.
None of his explorations are without their life-threatening dangers, and he is frank about them.  When he was squeezing through the tunnels underneath Paris, hoping not to get stuck or start a cave-in, I found myself thinking gratefully that I was not his wife, waiting in England for his safe return.  What must it be like, knowing that every trip he goes on could result in his death or serious injury?  Woman's lot from time immemorial.
This is not a comfortable book, and it raises many questions about human conduct and our treatment of the earth and each other, about our greed and blindness and destructiveness.  Our complacency.  But the questions are important and need to be raised, need to be thought about.
Or, you could just read the book for Rob Macfarlane's movingly beautiful writing, which just goes on getting better and better with each book he writes.

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