Book Review The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean by Susan Casey

Step into the otherworldly realm of the deepest parts of the ocean. Susan Casey promises and delivers on a journey so alien and immersive that you will emerge drenched in oceanic wonder.

Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Genre: Non-Fiction, Science, History, Animals, Travel, Adventure.

Publisher: Doubleday

Review in one word: Luminous

There is something deeply unnerving about descending into the deep of the ocean. Susan Casey has written a superb book about the liminal deep underworld of the ocean. She explores the collective human consciousness of watery realms from ancient maps and monsters to modern deep sea manned vehicles, seafaring adventures and much more.

People are fascinated by the ocean’s depths because it mirrors Katabasis or Nekyia: descending into the dark and unexplored parts of the self.

“The idea of a descent into anything unnerves us. We descend into madness, into grief, into chaos. We fall into disrepute, fall from grace, and even worse, fall into oblivion. We’re hardwired to look upward, to head toward the light. Heaven is up there, in our opinion. But what if we have it upside down? What if the deeper you go, the more astonishing everything becomes? To me that seemed like a compelling possibility, but there was only one way to know”

The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean by Susan Casey

There’s much to enjoy and savour in this wondrous love letter to the deep ocean. I loved The Underworld so much and have now become a dedicated fan of Susan Casey.

The first chapter and arguably the best one is about Swedish seafaring storyteller Olaus Magnus born in 1490.

“Indeed, I should also add that monsters, some long-familiar, some unprecedented, are sighted off Norway, and this is due particularly to the unfathomable depth of the waters”

—Olaus Magnus

As a cleric and a scholar, Magnus took everything he learned and heard through gossip and folklore about a lion with a man’s face in India and werewolves and filtered it through the Bible, Aristotle, Pliny, and Ptolemy’s Geographia and through this he created the epic Carta Marina.

This became an iconic map that outlived him and became the gold standard for sea monsters.

“Fear can take strange forms, so it’s not surprising that our fear of the ocean abyss—a realm that Carl Jung compared to the madhouse of the subconscious mind—has produced some of the strangest forms of all. From the start, we’ve imagined the worst. In the absence of any personal experience with the deep, we’ve stocked it with apparitions from our minds’ darkest corners. It’s the oldest archetype in the human storybook: the monsters, the freaks, the others—the beings we don’t recognize, so we react to them by recoiling. Aristotle set out to demystify them; Pliny was determined to amplify them. Magnus’s genius was to get them all down on paper.”

The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean by Susan Casey

For me this was incredibly exciting to see one of my favourite all-time maps dissected in such a gorgeous and evocative manner by Casey. You can read more about it on this blog here.

Ditto in Chapter 2. The way that Casey describes the deep is really the most poetic and vivid that I’ve ever read:

“Worms glittered like gems. Gorgonian corals radiated a soft white glow. Plumy sea pens flickered like lilac flames. Brittle stars were lit with neon green. Far from being a black hole, the depths were ablaze with fireworks.”

The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean by Susan Casey

Here Casey paraphrases one of the earliest deep sea divers who witnessed the kind of otherworldly blue present where normal light no longer reaches, absolutely fascinating and transportive…

“What really struck him was the uncanny quality of the light. Only the last pinch of the visible spectrum remained, its indigo embers brilliant in their purity. On the brink of utter darkness, the final traces of light appeared eerily radiant. “We were the first living men to look out at the strange illumination: And it was stranger than any imagination could have conceived,” Beebe would later write. “It was of an indefinable translucent blue quite unlike anything I have ever seen in the upper world, and it excited our optic nerves in a most confusing manner.” The blue was so piercingly vivid, he felt, that language couldn’t describe it. It was more like an emotion than a color, one that “seemed to pass materially through the eye and into our very beings.

This is a true treasure of a book and takes you to the depths of the Benthic zone to explore the most peculiar otherworldly creatures and other ways of seeing the world that you never imagined existed. I highly recommend this book and give it five stars.

To aid your aural transition to the deep, here is a cut from the superb album ‘Deep Sea Exploration’ by Dub Techno artist Dublicator. This seems to be the perfect song for subject matter – Bioluminescence. The entire album is incredible though too. Happy reading and happy listening!