"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."
A potted history traces fiction in which humans turn into plants, from Daphne's laurel transformation to Yeong-hye's refusal of food and rooting. The pattern presents women implanting themselves as gestures of despair and protest. Rhett Davis's Arborescence stages cross-species transformation at scale through Bren, a dismissive narrator, and Caelyn, a determined researcher who advocates voluntary arborescence as a provocative solution to ecological sustainability and ageing populations, pitched in the tradition of Swift's Modest Proposal. As reforestation spreads, Bren drifts through small domestic moments—work at The Queue, a failed rabbit rescue, Reuben sandwiches, gin with his mother, and visits to his father in a nursing home.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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