The title of Melanie Cheng’s latest book, The Burrow, operates on two principles. It references the pet rabbit that’s adopted by the family at the centre of the novel, as well as inferring hidden sources of damage that lie beneath the rocky, unsteady surface.
Fiver, a nine-week-old fawn-coloured bunny is purchased in Melbourne during one of the city’s many COVID-led lockdowns. This small gain is supposed to alleviate the great loss the family has been enduring in the previous years. Such a loss, Cheng writes, left a hole ‘with an immense gravitational pull – a pull so strong it sucked in all the light’. In the aftermath, it feels as though the family is sleepwalking through their lives, so caring for this scared, diffident, nervous creature means perhaps they can focus their attentions elsewhere instead of obsessing over internal memories of trauma.
Into the household – consisting of father Jin, mother Amy and 10-year-old daughter Lucie – enters temporarily, Amy’s mother, Pauline, with a broken wrist. It’s been deemed safer to care for her in a home rather than hospital setting due to the rapaciously infectious COVID virus.
The Burrow tracks the changing familial dynamics upon her visit, as Pauline too becomes a caregiver of Fiver. ‘Perhaps this was the purpose of pets after all,’ she ponders, ‘to provide a buffer between humans who had forgotten how to talk to one another.’
For a slim book – almost novella length – The Burrow packs in a lot of heightened and charged emotions. Cheng writes with characteristic sensitivity and empathy; the narrative is divided into the point of view of her quartet of characters. Mother and daughter, husband and wife, grandmother and grandchild, each of these pairings are given focused attention. It’s a quiet, reflective book, but all the more powerful for its understatedness.
Its intergenerational explorations of grief, blame and acceptance are laid bare, without the need for any pyrotechnics and showy prose. The claustrophobic state sanction, domestic setting and uneasy footfalls of family members walking trepidatiously around each other creates a tension that will, ultimately, break with the airing of revelations and secrets. In this clear-eyed and unsentimental study, a chink of hope is allowed to shine through.
The Burrow, Melanie Cheng
Publisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 9781922790941
Format: paperback
Pages: 208pp
Price: $32.99
Publication Date: October 2024
