Aye, Susan Casey, with a writer’s zest, an ocean lover’s fervor, has driven her pen into the very marrow of the sea’s mystery in The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean. A thing remarkable, a book illustrious in its narration, a captivating spell woven with maritime curiosities of the profoundest kind. There’s a non-fiction richness to it, a resonance that evokes an urge to turn to a stranger and commence to recount some factoid newly discovered.
We’re taken by Casey, an engaging and restless guide, far from the comforts of the known sea, beyond the shallow delights of scuba, into the great cosmic enigma of the abyssal. She narrates not like one chained to facts, but in an erupting enthusiasm, a blend of scientific musing and the philosophical pensiveness of a person deeply in awe.
Her curiosity’s no meek thing. A mystery, a vanishing plane in the deeps, propels her exploratory vigor. A bit of history and a touch of myth take her—and us—down below, where methane breathers and glassy beings lie. There are giants and monsters of an age-old tale, but also the pioneers, the 20th-century seabed wanderers like William Beebe, mingling with our human lore.
The narrative’s journey is an intellectual sojourn, a delightful crisscrossing of eras and discoveries. An ancient mapmaker here, a modern tech-wielder there, voices of explorers and thinkers past and present, intertwined in a journey around the globe, across centuries, into the minds of men and women grappling with the grand puzzle of existence.
But, alas, the venture isn’t without its dire chords. Casey’s lyrical voyage is not one that avoids the perilous shore of reality. She’s a siren calling out against the rocks of human greed, the deep-sea mining, the scars we etch upon the planet. The cries of the endangered mingle with the ethereal wonder; the tragedies of submersible losses are felt in our very bones.
The concluding plunge, a descent with the bold Vescovo into the Pacific, is an epic’s closing hymn, a testament to exploration’s grandeur, to life’s eternal reaching into the unknown. The haunting beauty and fragility of our aquatic globe are laid bare, a solemn reverence mixed with an explorer’s zeal.
It’s a literature of the sea, but also a literature of mankind, of our timeless pursuit, our boundless curiosity, our tragic follies. In Casey’s The Underworld, the spirit of inquiry, exploration, and humanity’s connection to the natural world is laid out with a passion and profundity that would make any reader pause, reflect, and perhaps look out into the horizon, where the sea meets the sky, and wonder.
WORDS: Earnest Hutton.