The Leveret: A Novel That Explores Grief Through the Bond with a Baby Hare

A Novel of Profound Loss and Unexpected Connection

Anna Goldreich's highly accomplished, calmly devastating first novel The Leveret opens with the raw experience of birth: "A detaching, a loosening of something, then the pain of it." But instead of the expected cry of a newborn, there is silence. This moment sets the stage for a powerful exploration of late miscarriage and the profound grief that follows for Clare, the novel's protagonist.

Since experiencing this miscarriage six months ago, Clare has felt everyone around her, including her partner Phoebe, impatiently expecting her to "get on with her life." Instead, she remains floored by loss, stuck waiting for that first cry that never came. In a drastic attempt at change, the couple has moved to a cottage in the rural village where Phoebe grew up, where Clare sits day after day, failing to eat, while Phoebe helps her farmer parents with lambing.

The Hare as Catalyst for Healing

Pregnancy had been the first time Clare developed a sense of herself as a real person with a physical body – not just the "floating head" she'd always perceived herself to be. The determined physicality of the growing baby had pulled her into a more fleshy awareness of herself. Now, after her loss, she finds herself unreal again – until she discovers an abandoned baby hare under a hedge.

Goldreich writes this discovery as a second birth, full of the pulsating life that the first birth lacked. Clare reaches through bramble thorns, "and through the pain, through the tearing, there is softness. My hand over a head, fingers spread out on a back … Her. Pulling her up from the undergrowth, though the space I have opened for her, bringing her out to meet me." Like the stillborn baby that she nuzzled in the hospital, Clare finds herself licking the hare's face clean with her tongue, and feels pulled back into life.

Three Layers of Narrative Possibility

From this point, Goldreich succeeds in making the moments between Clare and the baby hare she names Isla eerily moving, even as they become more disturbing. The novel keeps three simultaneous possibilities in play for the reader: the hare as a symptom of mental illness; the hare as a desperate but uncannily sane attempt at self-cure on Clare's part; and the hare as a means to access the ultimate truth that we are all creatures in need of contact with the earth.

For weeks, the leveret sleeps in Clare's arms and is carried around in a sling. Then Isla becomes wilder, and Clare desperately clings to the delusion that these are mere rebellious antics, trapping the hare in a domesticity it can't survive as she tracks Isla's changing height on the doorframe and talks about her mother as Isla's "granny".

Literary Strengths and Structural Challenges

The Leveret is a slight book in some ways. Goldreich attempts to make it polyphonic by alternating chapters from Clare and Phoebe, but the sections in Phoebe's voice don't take flight. There's a suggestion that Phoebe doesn't share the kind of linguistic eloquence Clare thinks with – that she may, indeed, not think verbally at all. This presents a literary challenge that many writers have grappled with; Phoebe's love for Clare is all the more affecting for being haltingly expressed, but the frequent line breaks in these sections feel weakly uncertain.

Nonetheless, Goldreich is astonishingly good at bringing both the original miscarriage and Clare's relationship with the hare to visceral life. The need for new models of our relationship to nature animates so much writing today, and Goldreich's approach here is mischievous and elegantly undogmatic.

The Ambiguous Resolution and Human Connection

Ultimately, it's up to Phoebe to claim Clare back for human love. The book leaves it ambiguous as to whether Clare has saved the hare's life or blighted its chances; but Isla has restored to Clare some of the physical reality that motherhood had promised, and it may be that the very failure of the project with Isla is part of that healing.

In a moment of extremity, Phoebe lets out "a strange cry from the depths of some poor creature, a hoarse sound, cutting through the wind", allowing for a moving realisation of the mammalian physicality still possible in the love between Clare and Phoebe. This final moment suggests that while nature offers one path to healing, human connection remains essential to our recovery from profound loss.