Reviewed by Brandon Kim, Greenhouse Program Intern
My earliest memory of Google Maps is in the backseat of my dad’s car. We were visiting my cousins in Connecticut, and we had ordered pizza for dinner. One of my cousins had opted to join my dad and I in picking up the order — something that proved useful when he started shouting that we had gone the wrong direction.
My dad looked at his phone. “But Google Maps is never wrong,” he said.
As it turned out, it had misinterpreted his request - there were two pizzerias with the same name, and we had gone to the wrong one. My cousin was left vindicated: his mental map, it seemed, was superior.
I tell this anecdote because I think it summarizes the essence of what has been lost in regard to maps with the advent of technology. Google Earth is the last of the 12 maps that Jerry Brotton covers in his monumental A History of the World in 12 Maps, and his initial description is reverential: “This is the geographer’s ultimate object of study, an image of the whole earth.”
And why wouldn’t he be impressed? In his introduction, Brotton lays out a definition of mapping that is as revolutionary as Ptolemy’s Geography, which is by coincidence the very first map that he covers. Brotton introduces us to a kind of cult of cartography; a perception of mapmakers as gods who “do not just reproduce the world, [but] construct it.” For much of human history, it was impossible to see the entire world in the way that we do, through images from space and geospatial technologies. Instead, says Brotton, the “only way of comprehending the world was through the mind’s eye” — or, through world maps.
Trawling through these weighty paragraphs, I was stunned. Brotton’s book was published in 2012, when I was just nine years old; Google Maps, meanwhile, was first launched in 2005, when I would be just two. In other words, I have grown up in a world where it was always possible to visualize the Earth. It had never before occurred to me that things could be different - that we could be, for the intents and purposes of those long-ago peoples, less than gods.
Of course, Google Maps isn’t perfect, as both my cousin and Brotton can tell you well. Brotton in particular concludes his book with the statement that it is impossible to create an “accurate map of the world,” for all of Google’s successes. Yet we have become increasingly reliant on it — to the point where these ancient conceptions of mapping have all but vanished from our collective memory. The unique thing about each of the maps in Brotton’s book is that they are imperfect, and in that regard, human. Every one of the maps reflect in some way the context of their birth, and thus the civilizations that created them. They are cultural centers — a fact that makes them useful for telling “a history of the world.”
The same goes for the “underland” of Robert Macfarlane’s imaginings. If Brotton redefines mapping, then Macfarlane redefines the world beneath the earth. The first chamber of his half-narrative, half-science book whispers of an almost Hades-like underworld — necropolises of Egypt, miners digging for gold, a father and son burying a time capsule that they unearth thirty years later. At the end of this chapter, Macfarlane gives us a definition of his self-coined term: the underland, he says, is that into which “we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.”
He elucidates in the following pages. Macfarlane’s conception of the underland is complex — un-bound by the typical images of caves and tunnels. The underland is a place of “deep time”, a place of “epochs and aeons.” It is a place where humanity represents just a blip in the grand history of the earth, and where its memories are kept hidden. It is a place where strange, old things are buried — and from which these things are emerging, with the advent of the Anthropocene. It is precisely because we are being confronted with the underland that Macfarlane has chosen to write about it.
Throughout his book, Macfarlane travels to various underground places — caves, mines, underground laboratories. Each of these places represent a different aspect of humanity, brought together by the deep allure of the underland. In this regard, the underland is a cultural center; in this regard, Macfarlane’s book is just as much a book on history as Brotton’s. For as long as it has existed, after all, humanity has been exploring this space beneath the earth.
Yet Macfarlane approaches his subject matter differently from Brotton. Brotton is a professor, and his descriptions of the maps he covers are largely informed by books and primary documents. This lends itself to a rather lofty, detached view of human history — one just as god-like as the cartographers of the maps that comprise his book. Macfarlane, in contrast, writes himself into the story. This is half-narrative, after all, and it is a personal one. If Brotton alights from above, then Macfarlane creeps below, wriggling belly-first through claustrophobic tunnels and descending into the bellies of mountains.
This disparity is none so apparent as when the two books converge on a single region of study - that is, France. Brotton focuses his efforts on the Cassini map, a Revolutionary-era masterpiece of cartography. It is a supreme illustration of the role of map as cultural center; it reflects a sense of fervent French nationalism at a time when even the names of months were being redefined by revolution. The Cassini map was the first topographic map of the entire Kingdom of France, and according to Brotton, it “presented its subjects with an image of a nation that was worth fighting for, and even dying for, in the endlessly repeated act of national self-sacrifice.”
Macfarlane too uses a map in his description of the country, albeit one of a decidedly different sort. It is a map of an “invisible city” - of the Paris catacombs, buried deep below the main city. Macfarlane consults from this map as he descends into this French underland, a place every bit as embodying the spirit of revolution as that of the First Republic. To the cataphiles that roam its tunnels, the Paris catacombs are a “Temporary Autonomous Zone” - a place where “people might slip into different identities, assume new ways of being and relating, become fluid and wild in ways that are constrained on the surface.”
Macfarlane joins these cataphiles - and in doing so differentiates himself from Brotton. He explores the history of this underland for himself, learning how successive generations of Parisians have interacted with and used this space for their own purposes. Seven years before the Cassini map was completed in 1793, the city decided to evacuate its dead from its “cemeteries, crypts and tombs” to the catacombs, which were newly mined out of the limestone beneath the city. While the catacombs evolved in purpose, the dead remained, and Macfarlane’s explorations repeatedly remind him — and the reader — of that fact. In one passage, Macfarlane enters a vertical shaft into which “hundreds of human bones are embedded: skulls, ribs and limbs.” A realization comes to him — “both cities, upper and lower, as a single necropolis.”
This difference in approach expands into a difference in style as well. The first chapter of Brotton’s compendium provides a microcosm: he writes like a textbook, with long-winded sentences that for the inexperienced reader come off as exceedingly dry. Though in many ways, this makes sense. After all, Brotton has never experienced the history he writes about, only read about it. Once again, he is omniscient; a narrator who can always describe, but never feel. Brotton’s book fails in its inability to capture the human element — and this, Macfarlane does well.
Macfarlane’s prose is beautiful, almost heart-stopping at times. It is painfully relatable: in one deftly painted passage, he writes about a moment in which, having just returned from the underland, he checks first the room of his youngest son, Will, to see if he is sleeping. For a few moments, Will is completely still - and suddenly panicked, Macfarlane quickly reaches his hand “towards his mouth to feel for his breath, to search for proof of life in the darkness.” Reading it, I wanted to say: I have done this! I have completely done this! Because this is a moment that is universal to all of us, and one that perfectly encapsulates Macfarlane at his best.
Of course, Macfarlane too has his hiccups. There are passages that lean a little purple at times, like that only paragraphs later, when he describes the “starlight silvering the fine down on the edge of [his son’s] skin.” Macfarlane knows beauty, but not quite restraint, and this is certainly evident in his occasional, purely imagery-driven tangents. Sometimes this devotion to beautiful writing leads to description that seems semi-fictionalized; in one instance, Macfarlane describes two children talking about the popular game Minecraft in a transcription that seems less than faithful. The conversation reads as if it has been stylized; it’s too aesthetic. I suspect that this decision is motivated by Macfarlane’s desire to capture the feeling of his experiences, rather than their complete truth. And while this isn’t necessarily ethically wrong, it is blatant enough that it feels out-of-place - one more example of Macfarlane’s tendency to lean to the extreme, in an approach that is again opposite of Brotton’s.
In many regards, these books mirror and overlap with each other. If the act of mapping represents the adoption of a “god-like perspective on earthly creation,” as Brotton describes, then Macfarlane’s lyrical descent into the underland is its opposite. And if a map can truly be considered a cultural center, “providing a unique image of its time and place,” then so is the underland, with its long history of human interaction.
Both these books tackle the same subject — human history. To read them back to back, as I did, is to see two sides of a coin at once. It is the same story, told in different ways.
Published by Los Angeles Audubon Society, Western Tanager Vol. 87 No. 1 Sep–Oct 2020.