“Mum,” Lucie said, “did you know that rabbits don’t cry?”
“What do rabbits do when they get sad then?” Amy asks.
“They hide and stay very still.”
Sometimes a book finds its way into your life and changes everything: your self-perception, your mindset, your view of others, and even the very foundations of your family. Melanie Cheng’s characters in The Burrow resonate long after the final page as she unveils the devastating consequences of grief on a family in the Australian suburbs during the Covid pandemic. It is a nuanced exploration of family dynamics amidst loss and the enduring power of hope. Jin, Amy, and their 10-year old daughter Lucie coexist in a state of quiet unease within their partially renovated home, their lives strained and isolated. With keen insight, the novel asks readers to examine their emotional biases about what it means to grieve while quietly revealing how mental isolation grips a person, leaving them emotionally paralyzed and still. Spanning only a few weeks, the novel, told in rotating third-person perspectives, introduces a family grappling with an unimaginable loss. Cheng vividly portrays the hidden depth of their struggle and inability to connect with one another, their tears replaced by a haunting stillness. Four years on, Jin brings home a pet rabbit for Lucie, hoping to restore joy in their lives.
From the opening pages, Cheng pays homage to Franz Kafka, not only quoting him but also lending the title of his unfinished short story, “The Burrow,” to her own work. The citation sets the stage for the novel’s exploration of fear and isolation: “The most beautiful thing about my burrow is the stillness. Of course, that is deceptive. At any moment it may be shattered and then all will be over.” This foreshadowing of impending doom immerses the reader in a world of anxiety and uncertainty. The family’s fragile peace is indeed shattered when Amy’s mother, Pauline, arrives for an extended stay. Pauline, a self-proclaimed “desperate and reckless” woman, threatens to unearth long-buried tensions and secrets as forced interactions in close quarters expose the family’s vulnerabilities.
Cheng’s Kafkaesque soul-searching of her characters’ anxious and grief-stricken minds captures the feeling of isolation and groping for connection in a wayward and threatening world. This sense of paranoia is amplified by the looming presence of the Covid pandemic, adding to the unsettling atmosphere. Cheng also intersperses the narrative with the pet rabbit perspective. By blending the notion of stasis and the pervasive paranoia of a prey animal with the nuances of human consciousness, Cheng creates a captivating psychological study of fear, vulnerability, and the search for safety — “Only the rabbit was still,” and “A couple of times, at twilight, when Amy had been searching the backyard with the aim of returning him to the hutch for the night, she and the rabbit had startled each other — he, scooting for cover, and she, letting out a shrill cry. What kind of life is that? Amy would think at those times. Forever anticipating death.”
The rabbit, Fiver, is named after Richard Adams’ classic Watershed Down. In Adams’s story, Fiver’s visions of impending disaster compel a group of rabbits to flee their home for safety. The path is treacherous, riddled with obstacles and uncertainties; yet Fiver’s vision of reaching their sanctuary fuels their hope for a new beginning. Similarly, in Cheng’s novel, the introduction of the pet rabbit, Fiver, mirrors the family’s quest for emotional safety. Just as Fiver’s visions guide the rabbits in Watership Down, the presence of Fiver in Cheng’s novel serves as a beacon of hope for a family wrestling with the fear of the unknown. Fiver, though seemingly small, becomes a source of comfort, reminding them of the possibility of finding a safe haven amidst the emotional chaos and uncertainty. This effortless integration of themes from Adams and Kafka’s work adds an intriguing dimension to Cheng’s novel.
We process grief in different ways. Resembling Kafka’s creature in the burrow, Jin’s grief morphed into an obsessive and paralyzing perfectionism and “showed in the neat lines and sharp corners of the room, and [Pauline] wondered if it was this meticulousness […] that had stopped him from finishing the front of the house.” Each character is trapped in their own mental burrow, where they grapple with their pain in a disorienting maze of bereavement. Jin’s struggle to connect with his wife and daughter, his deep-seated mistrust, and the ubiquitous feeling of failure and helplessness, haunt him throughout the narrative, leaving him to question his choices. Jin, an emergency doctor, knows “stagnation was never a good thing. Stagnant water attracted pests. Stasis within the body caused disease.”
Once a successful writer, Amy finds herself unable to write, trapped in a state of numbness, “sitting at her desk with her eyes closed and her face turned to the window, not writing or doing much of anything,” while occasionally seeking solace in assisting Lucie with her schoolwork. Amy’s “tears would fall, her laughter would burst out, but each time it felt like an involuntary reflex that had nothing to do with her.” These moments become even more gut-wrenching as we experience Amy through her daughter’s eyes: “Lucie stared, slack-mouthed, at the mysterious being who was also her mother — a woman who walked around as if half asleep most of the time but who could still find the energy to yell at her for (of all things!) kneeling by her bed.”
Much to Pauline’s concern, Lucie’s way of processing her grief takes the shape of imagining horrific things and seeing tragic outcomes everywhere as she witnesses her granddaughter’s morbid fascination with death, “There were clues: things she said in passing, a grisly observation about how a particular animal could die, or the prospect of a missing schoolgirl she’d heard about in the news being found alive (which was apparently close to zero). Comments so ghoulish they seemed out of place on the lips of a ten-year-old child.”
The paranoia and fear of death in Lucie’s intrusive thoughts echoes the paranoid fear explored in Kafka’s story The protagonist, a small creature inhabiting the confines of his burrow, exists in a perpetual state of anxiety haunted by the constant threat of invasion by a predator. During a car ride Lucie’s mind is “piling on the images of her mother: pinned beneath the crumpled carcass of their Volkswagen, flattened beyond recognition by a semi-trailer, coiled in the emergency lane with blood pouring out of her nose.”
Amy’s chapters capture the anxieties of a grieving mother with tenderness and honesty, seasoned with a subtle yet poignant social critique of modern motherhood: “But nobody had ever told Amy how irrational becoming a parent would make her. Instead, people had put fat books about sleep schedules and behavioural psychology into her hands as if their cool, clinical words were tools she could use when she was delirious with exhaustion and racked with anxiety about keeping her child breathing/eating/drinking/napping while trying to minimize the damage her hypervigilance.”
Jin and Amy also share a fear of vulnerability in their relationship. Torn apart by the traumatic events that altered their lives, they both yearn to be seen and understood by each other. “Couldn’t he see? It was her way of telling him she still loved him without saying so — without throwing open her legs and actually making love to him.”
While Kafka’s short story ends in ambiguity — as the protagonist is left alone and vulnerable in his burrow, with no one to turn to for help — Cheng’s novel offers a more hopeful resolution, suggesting that by acknowledging our emotional isolation and naming our fears, we can break free from their hold, life is “a matter of being torn into multiple parts and then standing by as those rogue parts walked the earth, unsupervised and unchaperoned, taunting destiny.” The novel targets the intricacies of trauma, leaving the reader to ponder the deeper implications of the characters’ behavior.
The Burrow strips us of our assumptions on how to grieve while positioning readers to investigate what it is and means to be alive. It is a thought-provoking reflection on trauma, and ultimately, forgiveness. Sometimes, we need to stop hiding and crawl out of the burrow so we can breathe again.
[Published by Tin House Books on November 12, 2024, 200 pages, $16.95 paperback]