Reviewed by Vera Tomasi
The Burrow
by Melanie Cheng
Text Publishing
Oct 2024, Paperback, 192pp, ISBN: 9781922790941, $32.99aud
Virginia Woolf famously argued that sickness, given its prevalence and intensity, ought to be a major literary theme. The same might be said of grief. Why is it that, despite the ubiquity of bereavement in our lives, the novel doesn’t deal with grief more often? The problem seems to be that grief, like sickness, is hard to dramatize. How do you forge narrative out of a condition that entails paralysis, an inability to move on?
The Burrow, a beautifully written new novel by Melanie Cheng, aims to address this very question. The novel deals with a Melbourne family struggling to accept change after an infant daughter’s death. Four years after the fatal accident, the family remains frozen in the attitudes of grief. The remnants of an abandoned construction project litter the yard. The parents, Amy and Jin, lie beside each other at night without touching or discussing their shared pain. As lockdown continues, the world’s paralysis serves as a symbol for the family’s emotional stasis.
Change, and thus narrative, comes when the family buys a pet rabbit. Amy and Jin adopt the pet because it’s “the first thing [their daughter Lucie] had shown real enthusiasm about” since her sister’s death. The parents worry, though: rabbits are so fragile, and they so easily die. Will the new pet help their daughter heal, or merely set her up for more pain?
Much of the novel’s suspense comes from this worry about the rabbit’s fate, and Cheng derives great drama from the parents’ fears. At one point, the ten-year-old Lucie declines to name the rabbit, out of fear that it will soon die. When Amy fails to discuss the issue with her, she berates herself: “Another parent, a better parent, would have coaxed the grief from the shadows. But not Amy… She had allowed the sorrow to lurk in the wings, gathering strength, while she stood in the open, weakly gesturing at it.” Here, as throughout the novel, Cheng’s language beautifully conveys the character’s state of mind: the quick, pattering rhythm of self-recrimination, the sense of grief as a palpable figure, powerful yet unseen.
The rabbit’s presence doesn’t only add new worries, though. It also creates opportunities for play. While caring for the rabbit, the family members occasionally surprise themselves with moments of fun. Soon after Lucie fails to name the rabbit, she and Amy walk away from the hutch and “giggle at the vulgar noises Amy’s gumboots made as she pulled them from the wet earth.” Cheng expertly conveys the way that, for people in pain, moments of joy often come unexpectedly, and almost unnoticed.
In yet another narrative shift, Amy’s estranged mother, Pauline, soon comes to stay. A medical team has decided that, after breaking her wrist, Pauline cannot live alone. Amy and Jin accept her presence with reluctance, though. As the novel develops, it becomes clear that Pauline played a role in their daughter’s fatal accident, and that her behavior afterward was morally ambiguous, at best. Cheng seeds the novel with such hints at secrets that only later come to light; it’s another device for adding suspense to a story that deals in emotional paralysis.
As Pauline settles into the family’s routines, Cheng deftly sketches the various characters’ feelings about her stay. When Jin greets her, Pauline “resent[s] his politeness,” perhaps sensing that it’s false, but also feels “anxious to show [him] she had changed.” When Amy sees her usually strict mother baking cookies with Lucie, she admits that: “the ‘fun grandparent’ was a side to Pauline that both thrilled and irritated her.” Her gratitude that Pauline is helping the morose Lucie have fun conflicts with resentment about her mother’s recent behavior, and about her own strict upbringing. It’s one of many cases in which Cheng shows the complexity and internal contradictions of the characters’ feelings.
Once Pauline and the rabbit have joined the family, the novel’s momentum comes mainly from revelations about the daughter’s death. Other secrets also come to light: infidelity, for instance, haunts Amy and Jin’s marriage. This gradual drip of information is both dramatic and psychologically realistic. The traumatized characters often circle painful memories, affording us glimpses of their secrets, before hurrying to repress the remembered pain.
In some places, Cheng does run into the usual problem with novels about grief. Several chapters feel static, as the characters ruminate over memories and resentments that are already familiar. Still, Cheng’s writing is so lovely, and her insights so acute, that even the slow chapters remain engaging. Her figurative language is especially striking. When Amy drifts into sleep, “better days flash, in orange hues, behind her lids.” Pauline reflects that, when one is young, “death [is] something to be teased and taunted, unseen and remote, like a hibernating animal.” Meanwhile, the death-obsessed Lucie imagines a corpse “cooling and hardening like old PlayDoh.” It’s no surprise that the novel’s best writing deals with death, but the book also includes moments of unexpected humor. Several minor characters, including a cheery policeman and a comically upbeat nurse, provide a welcome contrast to the dour main cast.
Overall, though, Cheng’s main achievement is that she has found the language to convey the way grief feels. Her writing provides a reminder that, when depicted with originality and skill, the movements of a character’s mind can provide all the narrative we need.
About the reviewer: Vera Tomasi is a writer who graduated from Brown University in 2019 with a degree in Literary Arts. They are currently enrolled in Bennington College’s fiction MFA program.