Book review: The rabbit is a “nine-week-old, fawn-coloured male mini lop”, the first thing 10-year-old Lucie had expressed real enthusiasm for “since the accident”. Fortunately, Australian writer Melanie Cheng immediately follows up this hint with the critical information that Lucie’s baby sister, Ruby, tragically drowned about four years earlier. Lucie is smart, solitary and very much aware of how badly her parents are coping. The girls’ father, Jin Lee, is an emergency medic and his wife, Amy, gave up medicine for motherhood and the beginnings of a critically acclaimed writing career. But Jin’s got some health issues and Amy hasn’t written since Ruby died.
With a title like The Burrow and the immediate focus on the rabbit, it might be a signal that this is a book about a shattered family being healed by the arrival of a new pet. It is, but mostly it isn’t. There’s another hutch in the back garden, the granny flat soon to be occupied by Amy’s mother Pauline, who has broken her arm and can’t go home by herself. She will of course stay with her only daughter, but it will be her first visit since Ruby’s death, and the relationship is obviously strained.
Pauline arrives promising herself that she will “be polite and recede into the background and make herself small”, but within 10 minutes she’s named the rabbit Fiver. In doing so, she introduces Watership Down to the novel, imposing on it a kind of echo of what Amy remembers as “an epic story of an odd group of rabbits and their quest to establish a thriving warren”.
The metaphoric load on the rabbits is balanced by an intensely human story. Chapters alternate between different members of the family and characters are fully drawn: Jin and his anxieties; Amy with her writer’s block; Lucie who copes by making herself invisible; Pauline, not wanting to impose, but lonely and missing her family. She can’t help reaching out, and as she does, everyone has to open up.
Cheng’s pacing is a distinguishing feature of her storytelling, with little episodes moving the family forward and back. Backwards: the rabbit gets sick; there’s an intruder in the back garden; Jin has to isolate after exposure to Covid. Forwards: many moments of joy, especially the joy of connections, and tricks of light and texture that make it dense with detail for the reader to linger and savour.
A clinical coolness reflects both Jin and Amy’s medical mindset and Cheng’s own professional background in general practice, and it helps to keep the story from becoming sentimental or even just overwhelmingly sad. Nor is it twee: even with the Watership Down framing, Cheng doesn’t anthropomorphise Fiver. He has instincts and reactions, but not emotions, and he is frequently described as a “prey animal” to emphasise his vulnerability.
There’s a real skill in being both subtle and obvious, and sometimes Cheng is close to the line of overthinking and overexplaining the hole left by children who die and the lives of those who loved them. The measured pussyfooting around the details of Ruby’s death occasionally gives the story a jarringly mysterious tone. The rabbit symbolism is laboured – yet the rabbit himself is a clever sleight of hand. We keep being pulled back to him.
This is Cheng’s second novel, following Room for a Stranger, and concentrates so much into a book of fewer than 200 pages. A precisely constructed simplicity makes it a smooth, even quick read; a simplicity that enhances the depth of empathy and humanity in a tale of grief and rabbits.
The Burrow, by Melanie Cheng (Text, $38), is out now.
