Shelf Care: Journey through subterranean worlds in Robert Macfarlane's Underland

"We know so little of the worlds beneath our feet. Look up on a cloudless night and you might see the light from a star thousands of trillions of miles away, or pick out the craters left by asteroid strikes on the moon's face. Look down and your sight stops at topsoil, tarmac, toe."

So begins chapter one of Robert Macfarlane's Underland, an illuminating journey through the Earth's subterranean landscapes. Readers travel from a dark-matter detection laboratory in Yorkshire to the catacombs of Paris; from the "understorey" of London's Epping Forest to Onkalo, a repository for nuclear waste in Finland.

Macfarlane has written several acclaimed books on travel writing, which explore, in his words, "the relationships between landscape and the human heart".

Mountains Of The Mind (2003) looked at the history of man's fascination with mountains, while The Old Ways (2012) saw him traverse Britain's ancient paths.

Underland, his best work yet, bears the hallmarks of his distinctive style. It combines first-person narrative with nuggets of historical detail, introspective musings and literary allusions. The writing is sensitive and true, testament to the author's love of language and life.

As someone writing in the time of the Anthropocene, an epoch shaped by humanity's impact on the Earth, Macfarlane considers what it might mean to see the world through the perspective of geological time. He notes that the chronology of the underland is measured in epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years.

"When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless earth."

There is a beautiful lyricism to Macfarlane's prose, which inspires a sense of wonder and joy at being alive. While it travels into the past, it also thinks ahead in time, asking readers an urgent, unsettling question: "Are we being good ancestors?"