Arboreality, by Canadian writer Rebecca Campbell, won the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. However, not being much of a speculative fiction reader, I didn’t discover this book through this award. Fortunately, some bloggers I follow, like Bill (The Australian Legend), do follow this genre, and his review convinced me that this climate change dystopian work fits into the sort of speculative fiction that does interest me.

Before I talk about the book, however, a little about the prize. It was established in 2022, in honor of Ursula K. Le Guin, and is currently worth $25,000. It has some specific criteria: it’s an English-language award for a single work of “imaginative fiction”, and intends to honour authors who “can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now”. This last bit is interesting – “real grounds for hope”. It reminds me of the Barbara Jefferis Award, which now seems to be in abeyance, but which was controversial because it stipulated that the winning work had to depict “women and girls in a positive way [my emph] or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society”. I don’t believe literature must offer hope or be positive, but I have no problem with awards sponsors making such stipulations.

So now, that out of the way, the book. It is set on Vancouver Island, a beautiful part of the world that I have visited. It’s novella in size, but, structurally, is best described as a collection of six inter-connected short stories:

• “Special collections”
• “Controlled burn”
• “An important failure”
• “Scion and root stocks”
• “Pub food”
• “Cathedral arboreal”

These stories are presented more or less chronologically, starting with the first two stories being set in the very near future (up to around 2050) with the last encompassing 2100. They are linked in various ways – by location; by characters (encompassing family and friends, ancestors and descendants, over time); and, as you’d expect, given the title, by trees, particularly but not exclusively, the arbutus and its mutant version, the golden arbutus. Each story focuses on a specific issue or idea and plays it out through personal stories, such as an academic saving books from a “crumbling” library (“Special collections”); a suburbanite trying to revive a devastated garden with local plants, as one-by-one his neighbours leave (“Controlled burn”); a luthier hunting for seasoned tonewood, via the black market if necessary, to make a Cremona-worthy violin (“An important failure”). These highly personalised stories are placed in context, through the addition of another voice – an omniscient narrator, in italicised sections – which conveys the wider ecological, economic and political picture. We see the land change through fire and rising sealevels; we hear of space colonisation; we learn of pandemics. It’s cleverly done, and although it requires concentration, I was more than willing to go with it because the vision Campbell presents is compelling in its awful believability. That, I think, is what telling a near-future story can achieve. It’s hard to pretend it won’t happen.

“What are we going to do?”

What makes this book so beautiful, however, is the way Campbell manages convey both absolute horror alongside a sense of hope born of human ingenuity, resilience, and sheer doggedness. Jude and Berenice, fighting a losing battle in their mission to save books, must constantly downgrade their expectations, which means becoming more and more selective about what is saved (and therefore also what is lost to human knowledge), but they don’t give up, and these books are seen in 2100. Similarly, Bernard, in his now empty suburb where gardens have died due to a watering ban, doggedly works to find plants that will live in his and neighbouring gardens, which we see, a few generations later in “Cathedral Arboreal”, has become a forest. And Mason’s “secret history” violin also appears in this last story in another generation. These people will not let go even though they are very aware of what has been lost, of what they have lost.

We’ve lived here for ten thousand years. Someone survived everything history threw at them, the fires and tsunamis, the earthquakes, the smallpox, the settlers. Empire. Capitalism. Someone’s going to survive this. (Benno, c. 2071, in “Scions and Root Stocks”)

The ecological story Campbell tells, alongside the human one, is fascinating, albeit probably more challenging to those of us who don’t know the plants of the region and their significance – the garry oak, the arbutus, the camas (lily), fireweed, Douglas fir, and so on. I know some of the plants she names, but I don’t know their particular role in the culture, their horticultural essence and value, or their symbolic meaning (if any any). Some I looked up, and some I didn’t, but certainly Campbell’s story is rich with interconnections here too, between past, present and future, and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous practices.

One of the meanings of “arboreality” is “of, relating to, or resembling a tree” which makes it a good literal title for a book in which trees stand for so much that is important to life – ecologically, culturally, and psychologically. But Campbell is also, perhaps, playing with the “sheltering” notion implied in “arbor” and “reality”.

The Ursula K. LeGuin Prize’s selection panel wrote:

Arboreality is a eulogy for the world as we know it. Rebecca Campbell’s extraordinary, deeply felt book explores the difficulties of the long hard project of survival. There are no heroes or villains here—only people making brave, difficult choices, out of hope and love for their community, for art, knowledge, and beauty. Arboreality imagines things that we haven’t yet considered about what can and will go wrong with our gardens, libraries, and archives if we don’t act now (maybe even if we do). In her masterful and profoundly ethical stories, Campbell asks us what might be saved, what must be saved, and what it will take to do so. 

‘What are we going to do?” asks Jude in the opening story, “Special collections”. Well might he ask. Arboreality is an astonishing book because of the way it imagines the dire, with all its attendant griefs, side-by-side with survival (and its attendant, hope). This makes it a bit discombobulating because we are constantly surprised by what happens next. The world is not beautiful, and life is tough, but people are surviving and working their way through what life has thrown at them. I don’t imagine Campbell intends us to think, “it’s alright then, let’s continue along our merry, destructive ways” but more that when (because we are, it seems, past “if”) we are confronted with the worst, humans can, and hopefully will, find ways through. The question is: is this the future we want?

Rebecca Campbell
Arboreality
Hamilton, Ca: Stelliform Press, 2022
128pp.
ISBN: 9781777682330 (eBook)