09-04-2025
How to search for Atlantis in the 21st century
There is something singularly camp about the idea of Atlantis. Perhaps it's the way the drowned city is usually depicted – all Ionic columns and woozy, wobbly vegetation. Or maybe it's that every film featuring an underwater city is irredeemably naff: Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Aquaman, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
So it takes a brave writer to take on Atlantis, and to do so as soberly as Damian Le Bas in The Drowned Places, his poetic account of learning to scuba dive in search of the mythical kingdom. Atlantis is a portable myth, and for Le Bas, its trappings are simultaneously specific – 'a place of ruins: columns, arches, towers, walls caressed by soft blue light' – and hazily timeless.
Little wonder, then, that it has been 'found' in locations as far apart as Greenland and Greece. In The Drowned Places, Le Bas's travels take him from Turkey to Jamaica's Port Royal as he visits places that – whether through natural disaster or man-made change – have been suddenly lost beneath the waves. Each spot illuminates a particular aspect of the Atlantis myth, though Le Bas is canny enough to state from the outset that his quest is for its metaphorical connotations.
Throughout his search, Le Bas refers to Plato, the first writer to mention Atlantis. In the philosopher's Timaeus and Critias, Atlantis was a mighty civilisation on a continent-sized island in the Atlantic. It was ruled by a demigod, Atlas, son of Poseidon, who gave his name to the place: Atlantis nesos, the isle of Atlas. But Atlantis grew much too powerful, and its citizens were punished by the gods for their hubris with a terrible war and a cataclysm, which drowned them. Elements of Plato's story appear in almost every other retelling, and many have tried to map his account onto real-life floods and wars.
However, the trouble with these theories is that they come from an attitude of patronising posterity. It's impossible that Plato simply made his tale up, these voices argue: he must have been drawing on actual historical disasters. It's easier, too, to believe that knowledge and technology spread around the globe via some long-vanished master civilisation that was submerged for its sins than to acknowledge that human development has been repetitive, chancy and ultimately unplottable.
Le Bas is a nimble guide to this history, and if The Drowned Places were only that, it would be enjoyable enough. The trouble, though, comes from what else he tries to fit into the book. As well as a history of the search for Atlantis, The Drowned Places is an account of Le Bas's diving initiation – and of grieving for his father, who dies at the beginning of the book.
In itself, such heterogeneity isn't an issue: Le Bas's first book, the Somerset Maugham prize-winning The Stopping Places, superbly braided together a journey around Britain with an exploration of his Romany heritage. But the disparate elements of The Drowned Places rub scratchily against each other. Like many contemporary landscape books, it tries to do too much. It can't simply be a memoir of grief, or an exploration of learning to dive – or even a guide to Atlantis. It comes apart at the seams.
Still, Le Bas is a fine, vivid writer and his diving adventures are immersively told; I've read few better descriptions of the contradictions of the sport – its wonder and terror, its absurdity and grace. Struggling into a wetsuit, he can't decide whether it's 'a selkie skin, a superhero's costume, or a gimp suit'.
He also provides plenty of fodder for the thalassophobic. Eighty feet down in near-zero visibility on a wreck dive in the English Channel, he loses sight of his dive buddy. 'When a scuba diver dies more often than not it is the panic which kills them,' he writes. 'It is two selves fighting: your animal self screaming, Get out of the sea now; and your diver's mind restraining, wrestling it back down.' You finish the book almost wishing he'd got himself into more sticky situations.
Perhaps, though, it's hard to imagine Atlantis – or even write really crisply about being underwater – because these subjects take us so literally out of our depth. Several years ago, I took a liveaboard dive boat to an Indonesian archipelago. Surrounded by uninhabited islands, and with the full reach of the Pacific Ocean in front of us, it felt like the edge of the world.
We descended and were surrounded by dozens of manta rays. They danced around us in columns stretching all the way to the surface. When we eventually came up, my diving partner turned to me and tore off his mask. 'F--k,' was all he had to say. I still don't think I could have put it better myself.
