The Burrow by Melanie Cheng

Title: The Burrow

Author: Melanie Cheng

Genre: Contemporary

Publisher: Text Publishing

Published: 1^st October 2024

Format: Paperback

Pages: 192

Price: $32.99

Synopsis: Amy, Jin and Lucie are leading isolated lives in their partially renovated, inner city home. They are not happy, but they are also terrified of change. When they buy a pet rabbit for Lucie, and then Amy’s mother, Pauline, comes to stay, the family is forced to confront long-buried secrets. Will opening their hearts to the rabbit help them to heal or only invite further tragedy?

The Burrow tells an unforgettable story about grief and hope. With her characteristic compassion and eye for detail, Melanie Cheng reveals the lives of others—even of a small rabbit.

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During the days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a young family dealing with crises and depression years after a tragedy that irrevocably changed them all gets a rabbit called Fiver around the same time as grandmother, Pauline, moves in after a fall. Jin and Amy reluctantly get the rabbit for Lucie. They think it could be a way to heal the fractured family, who have been stuck in a loop of grief for four years.

It is the presence of Fiver and Pauline, Amy’s mother amidst the pandemic days and dying days of a lockdown in Melbourne that start to shift things. Everyone in the family has secrets, things they don’t want anyone else to know. Each chapter unfolds the stories of the characters, and how they relate to each other, the world around them, and the tragedy that has led them into this new reality that has been marred further by COVID-19, lockdowns, and restrictions. Jin and Amy’s new reality is fractured and broken, far from the lives they imagined four years ago. The novel hints that this is when happiness left their lives, and when they all became terrified of change, or when Lucie developed one of her unusual fascinations.

The Burrow is quite an internal novel, an examination of a family in crisis who are at first, unable to deal with a past tragedy or even speak to each other about things. On the surface, they seem happy, yet when anyone of them tries to hang onto a tiny vestige of hope, something comes along to destroy it.

Throughout the novel, there is a sense of impending doom that something is going to come along and destroy the happiness that the family is eking out. Something wants to come along and destroy. To disrupt the delicate balance Jin, Amy, Lucie and Pauline are trying to navigate in the days of a pandemic. It is littered with reminders of those early pandemic days: PCR tests, isolating at home for two weeks, lockdowns, at home learning, and masks. In setting this novel during the pandemic, Melanie Cheng has created an environment that can focus on a single family and their experiences, and allows it to thrive. The novel gathers a delicate balance of modernity and the past – Lucie reads books, and connects with an old novel loved by her mother and grandmother – Watership Down. And the presence of her pet, Fiver, punctuates their lives. It is as though his presence, story, and caring for him are the impetus for secrets to come out, albeit in a fractured way as everyone navigates the grief they’ve buried for four years. It reverberates with the secrets that the characters have to navigate as they find ways to deal with what they’ve kept buried for so long.

In its quietness, it highlights the inner workings of a family amidst crises that affect the world and affect people on an insular level. At certain points, the human characters give way to tiny paragraphs that give insight into Fiver and his thoughts, illuminating that the world for him is quite simple. Even if he notices things are a bit odd around him. There was a sense of quiet desperation throughout the novel – the characters inwardly screaming to be heard, seen, and understood. It reverberates with the sense that this is an unhappy family trying to heal themselves. This is a novel that reminds us that whatever is going on in the wider world that communities are collectively dealing with, we never truly know what is going on within a family or for an individual. They could be coping with a tragedy only they will remember, a loss that has been erased by society but still felt by a family. It is these tiny moments, tiny things within our lives that are important. Novels like The Burrow take the opportunity to unpack what this means for those affected, and the insularity of grief and trauma. It focuses on this family, yet speaks to a wider understanding of how we respond to grief, tragedy, trauma, and worldwide events that trigger varied responses in people. It allows the freshness of the grief to come through and ricochet through their lives until it reaches a head.

This is a quiet novel with moments that feel like they could explode. The family is at times a ticking time bomb with its secrets, and that is what makes The Burrow work well as an examination of the COVID era, and the interior lives of a family in its stark simplicity of language. It is a COVID novel that reminds us how quickly life can change in an instant, whether you are a human or a rabbit.