Rhett Davis’s Arborescence follows a near‑future wave of people becoming trees

Rhett Davis’s novel Arborescence is an even‑tempered, quietly satirical speculative book set in a near‑future Australia in which large numbers of people undergo cross‑species transformation and take root as trees. The story is told by Bren, who at first is dismissive of reports of “people standing around believing they’re trees”, while his partner Caelyn pursues the phenomenon with curiosity.

At his job at “The Queue”, Bren processes “work packages” for a manager he suspects is a “disembodied intelligence”; Caelyn trades a garden centre role for PhD research into those who become trees and becomes a prominent academic arguing that humanity should let people “arboresce”, if that is their choice.

The world moves toward reforestation as Bren drifts between stints as Caelyn’s assistant, memories of a rabbit he did not save, a Reuben sandwich, gin with his mother, and visits to his father in a nursing home. The reviewer situates the novel alongside Elvia Wilk’s Death By Landscape and earlier literary examples such as Ovid’s Daphne and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, and calls Arborescence an econovel that cycles through cynicism, nostalgia and grief while feeling insulated from real ecological crisis.

The book does not offer a definitive reason why so many people choose to root.

Key Topics

Culture, Arborescence, Rhett Davis, Australia, Caelyn, Bren