FICTION
The Burrow
Melanie Cheng
Text, $32.99

As well as being a powerful writer of fiction, having won the Victorian Premier’s Award in 2018 with Australia Day, her collection of 13 sharp and absorbing stories, Melanie Cheng is a physician. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic she wrote in an essay for The Guardian how she experienced the “sad truth” that there was nothing to protect her but “a plastic apron” and a “duck-billed mask”.

Her exquisite new novel is set during the pandemic, and is a frank exploration of grief, of its colour, texture and reach. As the action develops, the reader comes not only to comprehend the depth of the sorrow, but to feel the heartbreak, and to follow the rocky road to healing.

It is four years since six-month-old baby Ruby drowned in the bath. The family now consists of mother Amy, father Jin, and 10-year-old Lucie with her “appetite for the macabre”. Add to this Amy’s mother Pauline who comes to stay while recovering from an injury. It was, in fact, Pauline, still burdened with guilt, who was in charge of Ruby when she died. They constitute an estranged quartet.

The story begins with the arrival of a pet rabbit, Fiver, named after the mystical rabbit in Watership Down, a book which Lucie and Pauline start to read together. The family in The Burrow has a need to re-make their home, which disintegrated when Ruby died. While the rabbits in Watership Down “travelled with purpose” to find a home, the human family here is stalled, bewildered and unable to focus, powerless to know how to begin to heal the monstrous wound that life has delivered.

The narrative is deftly structured to reveal, gradually, the history of the family, while also analysing the minds and souls of its members with tenderness and compassion. Each short section is dedicated to the scrutiny of one character, and this system sets up a rhythm which returns at long intervals to the world as it is for Fiver. He has only three short sections of his own, yet his spirit is a constant; his progress is central to the changes within the family. In counterpoint, forever beating at the heart of the novel is the horror of the loss of Ruby. Into the chasm left by the baby’s death come Pauline and Fiver, somewhat unlikely catalysts whose presence ultimately has the power to transform.

Amy and Jin, their marriage in crisis, are both doctors, and are always fully aware of the doom of the virus lurking in the shadows. Nothing in life is going well – Amy is trying and failing to write a novel, Jin is foundering at work, is considering being unfaithful, and imagines he is seriously ill. The house is a half-renovated mess, and the neighbourhood is threatened by a mysterious intruder. Someone hurls a brick through Pauline’s granny-flat window.

The family’s emotional relationship with Jin’s Chinese parents is tense and empty. In the garden is a rose bush with “crimson buds bursting through a nest of thorns”. This strategic early metaphor alerts the reader to the presence of an element of hope in the grim tangle of their lives. Much of the narrative works with metaphor, with the very title The Burrow being a simple and potent example of this.