The Burrow

This beautifully contained and elegant novel resulted in me gasping for air. Remembering the days of Melbourne’s lockdown is not easy, and this visceral tale of one family – one bubble – will knock you over in the same way Helen Garner does with her writing. One such memorable passage in the novel is when the husband, Jin, a doctor, believes that he has contracted Covid and he retreats to the isolated studio in his backyard. The place he built with his own hands. And lies on the bed and releases his breath. He has been waiting and wanting this moment: the moment that he contracts the disease, and he needs to isolate for days. He feels relieved. He has time now.

The emotion of time is important in this family drama. It is a novel about all the ways we hurt family members and all the secrets we keep from one another out of love. Jin and his wife, an author, Amy, purchase a rabbit for their daughter, Lucie, to appease her. A gesture of optimism, surely. Soon after, Amy’s mother falls and she needs to live with them while she recovers. Their lives are abruptly compacted. Their days are long, fraught with intense grief and fear and the wonder of the strange companion creature – a prey animal – that they have brought into their lives.

I fell in love with this complicated, cautious family. Their pain is described with meticulous kindness by Melanie Cheng, but she uses the paradox of the rabbit’s life to illustrate the movement of this family unit. Melbourne lockdowns caught us all on the fly, didn’t they? The virus did not care that we had unresolved family issues or even house verandas that lay unfinished under blue tarps. We all waited for a moment of release. And Cheng has brought all that home to us with this rendering of time.

This novel is a gift.