Underland

3 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary
A series of contemplative essays about hard to reach underground places

Review

Underland both starts well and is well intentioned – the author's impressions of a series of underground spaces, poetically rendered and carefully set in geographic and human context. Each chapter/essay is generally interesting and easy to read (with a few exceptions). It's coherence in the book overall that's lacking.

While Macfarlane writes well, he relies too heavily on broad, poetic statements and vague metaphors – and I say this as someone who loves metaphors. These are essays about the mood of a place more than its practical reality. That worked well at the start, but after a few such chapters – and even with plenty of time away from the book, I wanted more. Invariably, Macfarlane meets a local guide, tells us something about the person and how they live, and then they go marvel together at a beautiful underground place. The guides, for all their diversity, all seem to speak with the same voice, and by the end I just felt that Macfarlane had taken some pretty substantial liberties with their phrasing.

If you know these places, it's probably quite interesting to hear his take. If you don't – as will be true for most of us with most of these places – they all begin to merge a bit into one. There's no real thread through the book, other then sequential visits to neat places with invariably wise natives. By the end, I found the book more tiresome than enthralling or uplifting.