Arborescence furnishes this Ovidian metamorphosis with a new crop of ethical quandaries. What if becoming a tree was not, as it once was for Daphne fleeing Apollo, a spectacle of spurned lust, but of climate justice, or polluter’s guilt, or even misanthropy? What if this transformation was only in part voluntary, yet spread as easily as a virus or misinformation, altering the bodies of a billion and the lives of countless more? In a phrase, this is a novel of mass, or rather massified, metamorphosis. It aspires to wed domestic realism to an environmentalist thought experiment, to scale up organically from a young couple’s listless tiffs to the question of what an epidemic of re-wilding might mean for life on earth. That this marriage of genres never feels symbiotic has much to do with this couple’s woodenness, the sense that precious little Eros would be lost were their flesh to harden into bark. Sans any frisson, it is hard to be too concerned about whether these characters take root or not.

Bren, the narrator, works a series of dead-end jobs. As a digital liaison he delegates assignments, pens a few lines of code here and there, parses algorithms, sources images, and edits documents. Later, he is employed as a physical avatar by a disembodied intelligence, mic’d up for meetings with other actors who have been hired to do the same. This is all told via a series of clipped vignettes, replete with punchlines, which do occasionally land. He is at one stage sent ‘a promotional video of what looks like a penis but is not a sex toy’; he later receives confirmation that it is in fact ‘a cooking utensil for extracting the annoying fibres from ginger’. An eye for absurdity reads as the coping mechanism of a character with an understandably bleak view of the future.

Bren’s partner Caelyn, a doctoral student, tries to verify early instances of arborescence. Her research initially earns her the scorn of her colleagues – at one point her supervisor tells her that her thesis is ‘at best misguided anthropology, at worst fiction’ – and later a place in the public eye, as the spread of cases earns her attention as an expert in the field of ‘tree-human hybridity’. This success pulls them apart. Caelyn is absorbed by her work; Bren is reluctant to spend his days organising her calendar. If their gradual separation feels less poignant than it ought to, it is likely because they share a commitment to little more than Henry, their cat.

Bren is prone to slip into the enervating spiral of self-pity. ‘I’m worried that I should be happier for her,’ he muses in a single long sentence, ‘and I’m worried that, as a heterosexual male partner of a heterosexual woman in the first half of the twenty-first century I should be able to support her dream and forgo dreams of my own.’ There is little sense of irony in his deployment of these categories, or of motives or ambitions that might exceed the generic role he assigns himself. And this is precisely the problem, per the rest of his sentence, in that he has ‘no great dreams’ of his own: he worries that it is selfish of him to ‘make this about me, I’m antiquated, I’m a sad and defeated misogynist; but I’m still worried’. Bren at times seems a foil to Apollo, the god’s violent virility replaced with fussing over his lukewarm feminism.

Arborescence pursues a way out of this rote loop of self-abasement through the experience of those who become trees. Truncating their ability to verbalise their thoughts has the effect of making them much more subtle characters. In lieu of rote social identities, they present fresh arboreal ones: silencing the self, characters live on as jacarandas, robinias, acacias, maples, red gums, and in one unfortunate case an indoor palm tree. This is where Arborescence offers us a glimpse of something weirder and better, once the hollowed-out couple at its core splinters and Bren’s work as an arborist disposes him to contemplate what might have compelled those he cares for to transform when and where they did. What might have motivated a family of four descended from woodcutters to dig in? To take root within a forest is frowned upon, akin to doing so within a cemetery. An elderly cousin ‘suspects guilt’. When their trunks rot and they fall over, this is taken to imply that the forest rejected them. Here Davis offers a succinct fable, in which character is a question of intimation.

What might Arborescence have been had fewer words been devoted to conversations between people, and more to trees? Consider this description of a formerly human acorn. ‘There’s no obvious humanity here. No weirdly stretched skin, evidence of hair or muscle or bone. … And yet it’s not quite a tree either.’ This rendering negates, dissociates. ‘As if it were created too quickly to accumulate its usual density.’ In sentences like this, in which the residue of personhood is weighed in an acorn, Davis shows himself capable of a different kind of prose.