“It’s hard, I think, to know that you are the problem.” This is the reality that Bren and Caelyn, the couple at the heart of Rhett Davis’ second novel, Arborescence, must grapple with as they tally the losses of the climate crisis. “It’s hard to drive through these places and not feel the wreck of it, the ruin, the violence and the removals of its people.”
At the beginning of this strange and beguiling novel, we find ourselves in the company of these two twentysomethings looking for hope, meaning and connection as the world around them fractures. Bren, our narrator, is a plain-speaking, good-hearted young man who yearns for the world he knows to stay the same, and also for stability in his relationship with the mercurial Caelyn. He shrugs at the bizarre emptiness of his job as a remote worker in the content industry: “I log in to the Queue every weekday. It grows and grows, a little like a tree, and my job is to lop off as many branches as I can.” His colleagues may be human; he rather suspects they’re not. The erosion of the boundary between the human and the machine is unsettling but he gets on with things, doesn’t overreact.
When Bren and Caelyn hear rumours of people standing still in fields who insist they are trees, it’s fearless Caelyn who is drawn to them. The couple meet a community of “hopefuls”, people who are trying to “dig in” and grow roots, and “caretakers” who tend the saplings. This encounter sets Caelyn on a path of research that leads, over the decades charted in the novel, to her being a roving international expert on arborescence, which is to say, on people turning into trees. This plant-human hybridity challenges Bren and Caelyn’s ideas of what it is to be human just as intensely as robots, driverless cars and AI do.
Bren strives to support Caelyn, even when her academic colleagues deride her work – and yet he initially struggles to believe in arborescence. In the first stretch of the novel, the reader might share his scepticism. Where is the evidence? Is this a novel about delusion and despair in a time of crisis? Yes, but it is also a novel about people deciding to relinquish their warm animal bodies and turn into trees; when Bren stops doubting, the reader is given no choice but to accede to the weird and melancholy reality of Arborescence.
It’s an encounter with an oak tree that shakes Bren out of scepticism. He’s told this tree was once a young man called Oscar, and to his surprise, he believes it: “I don’t know why or how I know, but I know. This is not just a tree.” This is a typical example of the unshowy narrative style of Arborescence. Bren’s laconicism gets a bit flat now and then but it’s an effective counter to the strangeness he witnesses.
The pace of the novel accelerates not long after Bren and Caelyn meet Oscar, as arborescence becomes not just common, but widespread. People plant themselves in roads and public gardens, on rooftops and in their back yards. At public events, Caelyn reassures bereft audiences whose families and friends have planted themselves: arborescent individuals “seek to extend their lives without unbalancing the planet further”.
Time passes and new losses and questions accumulate, as folks struggle to grieve their loved ones who have dug in. Where does the humanity of these arboresced individuals lie? Is standing still and becoming a tree really, as a caretaker named Mika tells Caelyn, “a better way to be part of the earth”? Bren and Caelyn’s answers to these questions change over the course of the novel. If arborescence struck Caelyn and many others initially as a gesture of hope, it comes to look like acquiescence.
Arborescence is a novel full of such earnest questions, an invitation to meditate on what it is to be human in this time of human-induced climate change. Davis treads lightly and respectfully around the topic of land rights and colonialism – perhaps too lightly. To dig in and become a tree wherever one pleases upends received notions of property rights and imagines a new form of connection to land. I would have welcomed more reflection on what it might mean for so many despairing settlers to lay new roots on sovereign Aboriginal land.
Humans might be the problem, but annihilating them is not the fix proposed by Arborescence. Davis instead holds forth the hope of a restored balance between the animal and the vegetal, a form of human flourishing under a safe canopy of trees: “There will be a few pockets of warm light where small communities remain, still moving, still there, still talking, still learning.”
The novel closes with a sustaining portent of a rehabilitated symbiosis between humans and trees: “I look back at the city. One day, it will again be a garden. It is as inevitable as it will be beautiful.”
Arborescence by Rhett Davis is out now through Hachette ($32.99)
