Snap! Criticism: Rhett Davis & Christopher Warley

Dan Hartland An arborescent form is effectively a tree, and—although the sight of what remains of the human embedded in its trunk can be confronting—it may be cut down or removed in the traditional way. The most difficult to deal with are those in the dormant-transitory stage. […] It seems pretty fucking scary to me. In Robert Moor’s recent In Trees, the nature writer and journalist writes, “Let your mind grow like a tree.” He does so to exhort his readers towards an attempt to learn from what a tree is—in order to do better as a human being. In his review of the book in the TLS, Charles Foster argued that Moor “doesn’t anthropomorphize trees, but seeks to arborize us.” It’s a compelling vision of what difference might achieve—how much better a tree-like life might be. But in Rhett Davis’s Arborescence, first published in Australia in 2025 and only a few months ago here in the UK, the metaphorical is made actual. In this novel—from which this essay’s opening quotation is taken (more…