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Book review: The Burrow, Melanie Cheng

A new pet rabbit becomes the focal point for a grieving family.
Two panels. On the left is a black and white photo of a woman with shoulder length hair and a pale scarf looking into the distance. On the right is the cover of a book with "The Burrow" in red font on the top and a small rabbit on the bottom.

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

Thuy On is the Reviews and Literary Editor of ArtsHub and an arts journalist, critic and poet who’s written for a range of publications including The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, Sydney Review of Books, The Australian, The Age/SMH and Australian Book Review. She was the books editor of The Big issue for 8 years. Her debut, a collection of poetry called Turbulence, came out in 2020 and was released by University of Western Australia Publishing (UWAP). Her second collection, Decadence, was published in July 2022, also by UWAP. Her third book, Essence, will be published in 2025. Twitter: @thuy_on Instagram: poemsbythuy