“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.
