Melanie Cheng
The Burrow

If you understand something well, you can explain it simply. Melanie Cheng understands ordinary people – their love, their quiet desperation, their hope – and the restrained, elegant prose of The Burrow is testament to this. The novel is slim and each word is carefully chosen. It feels as if every sentence is a distillation.

Set in suburban Melbourne during the Covid-19 pandemic, we follow the inner lives of four family members – Amy, a writer; Jin, an emergency doctor and Amy’s husband; Lucie, their child; and Pauline, Amy’s mother. The novel switches between the perspectives of these four characters, who are each moving through grief after the accidental death of Amy and Jin’s six-month-old baby, Ruby. At Lucie’s behest, the family purchase a baby rabbit, who they name Fiver, after the soothsaying rabbit in Watership Down.

What follows is a quiet but probing examination of family dynamics. Each character is just trying to get through the day, but guilt, blame, desire and shame make it difficult for honest interpersonal connection to occur. Everyone is hiding something from themselves as well as from the others. The rabbit becomes the soft, warm, guileless presence that allows each character to step outside their self and consider life from the animal’s perspective. Plus, challenges feel more surmountable when one is watching a bunny eat kale.

There are a lot of strengths to this novel. One is Cheng’s depiction of Amy’s maternal guilt. Balancing career aspirations with the demands of parenthood, Amy is a case study of how gendered parental expectations weigh particularly heavily on working mothers. There’s also a line about one of her books – which took her a decade to write – selling only about 600 copies, which speaks to the frustrating economic experience of most fiction writers in contemporary Australia. Any writers reading this book will let out a sigh of recognition here.

Setting fiction in the timeframe of the pandemic is potentially fraught: many readers baulk at being brought back to that time and “pandemic novel” is often used as a slight. In this case, however, the pandemic setting works extremely well: the isolation experienced through Covid parallels the isolating experience of grief and the uncanny feeling that everything has changed and yet life goes on.

The feeling one gets when reading The Burrow echoes its title: one feels held and safe, as if one is in the hands of someone who knows exactly what they are doing.

Text Publishing, 192pp, $32.99

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 19, 2024 as "Madeleine Gray".

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