Melanie Cheng’s characters tend to be untethered and out of place. In her short story collection Australia Day (2017), which won the Victorian premier’s literary award for fiction, the author introduced various people navigating disconnection. And in her debut novel Room for a Stranger (2019), two adrift, solitary souls form an unexpected friendship. This interest in separation, in the ways we isolate from and reconnect to one another, persists in Cheng’s new novel, The Burrow.
This is a story of familial tensions, parenthood and grief in the wake of trauma, condensed into a novella. Set in Melbourne at the tail end of the pandemic lockdowns, when curfews are lifting but restrictions remain, it is told from the alternating perspectives of married couple Amy and Jin Lee, their 10-year-old daughter Lucie, and Amy’s somewhat estranged mother Pauline. This is a loving yet wounded family, each differently marred by an incomprehensible tragedy that occurred four years prior: the accidental drowning of Amy and Jin’s six-month-old baby, Ruby.
We learn early that Ruby died in a bathtub while being bathed by Pauline, who suffered a stroke. Neither Amy nor Jin holds Pauline responsible, but so much has been left unsaid, carving labyrinthine warrens in their psyches. Indeed, ever since Ruby’s death, the family has been “stuck”, as Lucie describes it. But after injuring her wrist, the lively yet fractious Pauline moves in with the family, bringing their home some needed vitality but also stirring long-dormant tensions. A second catalyst for change comes when the family adopt a baby rabbit, named Fiver after the “little bit magical” character in Watership Down.
Cheng tenderly renders the siloing, deadening weight of grief. There is occasional uninspired imagery – tears seeping like “drops of blood” – but mostly the novel’s unsentimental restraint allows for a quiet in which readers can sense the frayed, fibril connections between the family. The novel’s brevity belies its intensity, making palpable the violence with which Amy, Jin and Pauline have been cleaved from their former selves. We’re left with insights into trauma, but also parenthood and the psychological marks we inherit and pass on to our children.
With its poetry-like economy and submersion in familial undercurrents, The Burrow reminded me of Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow. However, whereas Au always trusts her reader, Cheng falters at times, dulling the resonance of this delicate story. The stasis of her characters speaks for itself, but at times we’re hand-held: “Their lives had become unbeatably stagnant, not just since the pandemic began (though that had made things worse) but in the years following Ruby’s death.” And when a stranger intrudes in the Lees’ back yard, thematic associations are spelt out: “First the home invasion and now the virus (which was really, if one thought about it, just another kind of invasion).”
Cheng is most compelling in her handling of the rabbit: a weaker author would have used the animal as a mere vessel of vulnerability, helping the Lee family lower their boundaries. Instead, each character is repulsed by the animal’s weakness, its nature as defenceless prey: “What kind of life is that?” Amy reflects. “Forever anticipating death.”
“How awful to be pursued and lusted after in that way,” says Pauline. “How utterly exhausting.”
Yet, skilfully, Cheng shows how we human beings, when confronted with devastating trauma, become prey ourselves: fragile, dependent creatures stalked by demons we can neither understand nor accept.
Setting The Burrow during the pandemic lockdowns was another risky move – novels, television shows and movies that scratch at this near-universal period of trauma and tedium, the aptly dubbed “boring apocalypse”, have so far an inescapable deadened quality. But here, she artfully marries her narrative’s interfamilial disconnection with Covid’s inextricable qualities of isolation and distance; the wearing of masks both figurative and literal. Rather than a key textural fabric of The Burrows, the pandemic remains a distinct yet nonintrusive background, complementing rather than distracting.
The Burrow’s epigraph is a quote from a Franz Kafka short story, one about a subterranean animal who, ever in fear of a looming threat, is compelled to secure his den. There are many interpretations of the story, but Cheng’s selection of it speaks of a stillness always in danger of being broken: “At any moment it may be shattered and then all will be over.” With a soft beauty, Melanie Cheng’s novel articulates this quiet as stagnancy, one in which we feign security as we quarantine from ourselves and each other, down in the dark burrows of our minds. The only way out, Cheng shows, is up.
• The Burrow by Melanie Cheng is out now ($32.99, Text Publishing).
