Arborescence by Rhett Davis review – why would people turn into trees?

This quietly satirical speculative novel tells a story of metamorphosis, but feels insulated from real ecological crisis

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n the book-length essay Death By Landscape, Elvia Wilk gives a potted history of fiction in which humans turn into plants. There is Daphne, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who is so afraid she will be raped by Apollo that she begs her father to transform her into a laurel tree. More recently, in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, brutalised Yeong-hye refuses food and takes root. Wilk argues that, in these stories and others, “a woman implants herself in despair, but also protest”.

Rhett Davis’s Arborescence – an even-tempered, quietly satirical speculative novel – tells a story of cross-species transformation at scale. The narrator is a man, Bren, who at the outset is dismissive of unverified reports of “people standing around believing they’re trees”. His partner, Caelyn, is curious and undaunted. She drags him out for a hike. “I’m not sure I like forests,” he complains. “I don’t like that part of The Lord of the Rings at all. It’s really terrifying.”

At “The Queue” where he works, Bren processes “work packages” for a manager he suspects is a “disembodied intelligence” that has hired a physically attractive human to represent him in meetings. Caelyn, by contrast, is “good at being good at things”. She trades a garden centre job for PhD research into people turning into trees. She becomes a famous academic, flying around the world arguing that humanity should let people “arboresce”, if that is what they choose to do.