By Sinead Heap
Melanie Cheng’s Covid novel The Burrow follows the introduction of a pet rabbit into a grieving household. Like her first novel, Room for a Stranger, The Burrow demonstrates Cheng’s talent for making ordinary human life appear extraordinary. As the front cover praise from Australian literary icons Christos Tsiolkas and Helen Garner suggests, Cheng’s latest book contributes to an impressive national canon of quiet but forceful storytelling.
For me, however, it hasn’t been smooth sailing. When I first picked up Cheng’s novel—adorned with a lonely rabbit and the word ‘Covid’ on its back cover—I nearly put it down. I feared it would be an overly sentimental account of the loneliness of pandemic isolation. At that point, years after the worst lockdowns and enforced mask-wearing, I was tired of hearing how difficult Covid had been. I was ready to move on, and so the thought of returning to that time made me weary. Furthermore, could a story about the healing power of pets be anything more than a cliché?
It turns out The Burrow is a tender, nuanced and beautifully restrained portrait of a family in disconnected turmoil. The novel is told from the alternating perspectives of a married couple (Jin and Amy), their eldest daughter (Lucie) and Amy’s estranged mother (Pauline). These perspectives depict the family individually grieving the death of Jin and Amy’s second child (Ruby), who drowned in infancy. This incident changed the family forever, with guilt, blame and deep sadness becoming the strongest, and perhaps the only bond between them.
I was fascinated by Cheng’s depiction of how each family member’s identity is uniquely entangled with the deceased––they are, in perpetuity, the ‘tiny group of people who would always remember and grieve for Ruby’.
Emasculated by his failure to save his daughter, Jin retreats into his medical job and an extramarital affair, suppressing his grief until he inevitably collapses. He craves ‘time to breathe … to think’ as he quietly suffocates, all the while appearing to be okay. His physical downfall—first Covid then a severe panic attack—symbolises his inability to contain his emotional turmoil.
I was struck by Cheng’s gentleness in exploring the expression and deterioration of Jin’s masculinity. I don’t usually get to sympathise with a male character who is grieving, especially not when part of that grief is tied up with some kind of failure in masculinity. More often than not, stories about male grief portray the ‘loss’ of masculinity as a necessary step towards well-roundedness, instead of something that is allowed to be grieved. In this case, Jin fails in the masculine imperative to protect—first with his daughter’s drowning and later during a break-in—and is understandably devastated. With both ‘failures’, I felt that Jin grieved who he was as a man, and by extension as a father and protector, as well as his more tangible losses. I applaud Cheng for writing a masculinity which above all is distinctly human.
Like Jin, Amy ‘copes’ with her daughter’s death by adopting a ‘habit of pretending’ which only faintly masks her deep craving for ‘destruction. A reckoning. A massive motherfucking fight.’ I found Amy particularly heartbreaking because I felt that part of her died with Ruby in a way that was different to the others. With this part of her gone, Cheng portrays how the rest of her life—connection to family, writing, sense of self—slowly dies too, leaving only resentment, cruelty and a grief which infiltrates everything.
A victim of Amy’s destructive pain, Pauline blames herself for the death. Pauline was supervising Ruby when she drowned but, suffering a stroke, could only watch helplessly. In the years that follow, she tirelessly seeks redemption for having been unable to save Ruby, but also for the medication-induced inertia which propelled her to go on a cruise in the aftermath of the accident.
When an injured Pauline must temporarily move in with the family however, a chance to repair the fractured relationship arises. In her tender care for both the pet rabbit and her living granddaughter, Pauline slowly reclaims her dignity and humanity. Both figures are in vulnerable positions of need—the rabbit’s need is physical while Lucie’s is emotional—giving Pauline the opportunity to provide the nurturing protection she couldn’t give Ruby. In doing so, she forgives herself, offering hope to those who also seek forgiveness for things outside their control.
While objectively the least responsible for Ruby’s death, Lucie carries a similar guilt to her family; in particular, she fears that she doesn’t grieve enough. She has obsessive thoughts of violence and death and is haunted by her dead sister’s body, having been excluded from seeing it. Without this proof, the accident feels like one of Lucie’s ‘intrusive fantasies’, unreal in the same way that her grief doesn’t ‘come naturally’ and instead ‘feel[s] like one of those tedious daily tasks … that she ha[s] to remind herself to do.’ Lucie’s inability to reconcile an identity for herself outside Ruby is peculiarly tragic; it’s as if her role as the living daughter is to be a constant reminder of the deceased one.
Ultimately, Lucie’s struggle to feel the right amount and kind of grief reflects the family’s stagnant nature as they fail to move past Ruby’s death. They seem doomed to live in a version of the past where the connections between them—ones that might have the strength to pull them into the present—don’t exist. This disconnect is why the pet rabbit is so important; he is a creature who lives solely in the now and he reminds the family of the fragility of life as they care for the vulnerable pet together.
In a final moment of unity, Pauline, Jin and Amy work together to carry Lucie—who is feigning sleep—to bed. Lucie’s pretense reveals the frail, vulnerable connections between each family member, while positing the child as the only one capable of nourishing these burgeoning connections into something vibrant and real. For me, this moment reinforces the importance of the innocent child-figure in a world where we try to eradicate such innocence much too early. The rabbit’s innate vulnerability unites the family while Lucie’s innocence reminds them to enjoy the life they have instead of mourning the one they don’t.
The Burrow could’ve been a bleak story of isolation and grief, but Cheng offers us something more nuanced. In the end, she leaves us with hope that the path out of grief is one that we needn’t walk alone.
Sinead Heap holds an Honours in Australian Literature from the University of Sydney and adores everything book related. She currently works in publishing and is learning all she can about writing, proofing and editing. She dreams one day of funding her own personal library and other hobbies by reading, writing and speaking about books.
The Burrow was first published by Text Publishing in 2024 and has an RRP of $32.99.
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