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Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane review – extraordinary and thrilling

Science and romance collide in Robert Macfarlane’s latest journey through nature, as he examines the world below

Last Christmas, perhaps wishing to get rid of an unwanted appendage to the family, my mother-in-law bought me a potholing experience in, or rather under, Snowdonia. I was led down an abandoned mine shaft which opened out on to a narrow ledge overlooking an apparently bottomless chasm. I experienced what my instructor would later tell me was “perceptual narrowing” – the way that, at times of pure terror, our field of vision dramatically constricts. At that moment, I was whisked back to the pages of my favourite childhood book, Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, which is about the hope and horror of underground places.

Robert Macfarlane quotes a long passage from Garner’s novel early on in Underland, his masterly and mesmerising exploration of the world below us. But, instead of perceptual narrowing, what this book is about is the broadening of perspective that comes when we take ourselves out of the familiar world of light and air. It is a book that seeks to re-enchant everyday existence by moving out of it; that asks us to be aware of those things, both actual and fabled, that move beneath our feet; it also seeks, as its subtitle “A Deep Time Journey” suggests, to reconfigure our experience of time, using the vast cycles of geological time and weaving in ancient mythical descents to take the measure of the Anthropocene era.

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from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2XOBkgi
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