Arboriculture Review by Rhett Davis – Why do people turn into trees? | imaginary

IIn the book-length essay Death by Landscape, Elvia Wilk presents a fictional history in which humans are transformed into plants. There is Daphne, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who is so afraid of being raped by Apollo that she begs her father to turn her into a laurel tree. More recently, in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, a brutalized Young-hye refuses food and takes down roots. Wilke argues that in these and other stories, “the woman plants herself in a state of despair, but she also protests.”

A quietly contemplative and quietly satirical novel, Rhett Davis’s Arborescence tells a story of transformation across genres on a grand scale. The narrator is a man, Brain, who initially dismisses unverified reports of “people standing around thinking they’re trees.” His partner, Kaylin, is curious and brave. She drags him out for a walk. “I’m not sure I like forests,” he complains. “I don’t like this part of The Lord of the Rings at all. It’s really terrifying.”

At “The Queue” where he works, Brain is processing “work packages” for a manager he suspects of a “disembodied intelligence” who has hired a physically attractive human to represent him in meetings. By contrast, Kailyn is “good at being good at things.” I traded a job at a garden center for doctoral research on people turning into trees. She has become a popular academic, traveling the world and arguing that humanity should allow people to “tree plantation,” if that is what they choose to do.

As the world moves toward reforestation, Brain slows down and drifts. For a while, he was Cailin’s assistant. He thinks about a rabbit that he did not save from the road. He reflects that working at The Queue “means nothing.” Easily distracted by food and drink. He eats a Reuben sandwich even though it collapses. He drinks gin with his mother. He visits his father in a nursing home, and listens (quietly) to “a confused monologue of goals, mud, elbows to the face, screaming fans and the team that doesn’t exist.”

The death of Brienne’s father and references to rising temperatures give insight into the real-world contexts on which the novel is based. Voluntary mass afforestation is a provocative solution to the twin challenges of environmental sustainability and care for an aging population, put forward in the tradition of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal of 1729. The Irish writer’s ferociously extended joke suggests a rational response to the problem of famine in Ireland: the poor Irish should sell their children as food to the rich.

The only drawback to abortion is that people are too attached to other people. Brain visits a tree that was once his best friend at school and feels angry. They have been associated with a comedy and television show called Voidstar. Descriptions of Voidstar episodes pepper the novel. Their strangeness and ambient nostalgia contrast sharply with Kellin’s practicality and experimentalism. Voidstar is a shape-shifting character, appearing variously as a “faceless little boy”, a “sapling in a sleek future city”, and in one episode as “the sweet chaos”.

This description fits the novel itself. It is written in brief sections, some as short as a single line (“There are so many ways we can pretend we’re not here”). The writing is fast, precise, contiguous, and somewhat awkward. The world outside Australia in the near future is superficial and full of references to the United Nations and experts saying things like “this is the biggest economic change to affect the world in this century.” Afforestation runs through the familiar mood of environmental self-inquiry in the West – cynicism and optimism, dynamism and depletion, nostalgia and sadness – but it is an economic narrative that seems disconnected from the real environmental crisis.

Cailin’s research doesn’t pinpoint a specific reason why so many people have to go through the painful process of rooting in the soil. I wanted to understand why Brienne himself felt increasingly desperate and desperate to escape. One of the few clues comes when he thinks about his gender. “As a heterosexual male partner of a heterosexual woman in the first half of the 21st century, I should be able to support her dream and give up my own, but something about that remains difficult to comprehend,” he reflects.