Nick Cave, the poetic dark lord, has never shied away from extremes in his song-writing and nor does he here in this, his second outing into the forum of novel writing. The man who once penned lines like “I was born on the day that my poor Mama died; I was cut from her belly with a Stanley knife” and, “I stuck a six-inch gold blade in the head of a girl” pulls no more punches in the long-form writing to ram home his point than he has in his song-writing.
Cave’s satire and gallows humour intersperse beautifully with his dramatic descriptions and elegant prose, combining to create a novel that is both tender and terrifying, depraved and hilarious.
Bunny Monro, the despicable “hero” of the piece is a salesman who spends the majority of his time fantasising about the vaginas of celebrities, particularly those of Avril Lavigne and Kylie Minogue, and those of just about every woman he encounters. When he’s not fantasising, he’s finding his way, using whatever means necessary, to bed virtually every woman who answers the door to him. These interludes are often hilarious, and disgusting and in at least one case, shocking and abhorrent.
Bunny’s infidelities and lack of any empathy for his wife lead to her committing suicide, leaving Bunny to look after his nine year old son, Bunny Jnr. With no idea how to care for someone else, much less an encyclopaedia-toting child, and haunted by the ghost of his wife, Bunny hits the road, dragging his son with him, to “learn the ropes” of door-to-door selling.
The coke-snorting, alcoholic, misogynistic Bunny Munro spirals from one bad encounter to the next, his mental state and depravity declining at an accelerated rate as he hurtles toward the doomed ending that the book’s title suggests. The first line says it all, “’I am damned,’ thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die.”
And damned he is. Munro is such a despicable character that he is at once unlikable but as his decline in madness and towards his own death increase, we must pity him. Bunny Munro may not be likable but he is absolutely, absurdly and terrifyingly real.
Why should we care about him? What makes us continue to read on, determined to see him through to the bitter end? A large part of that answer is the view we get of him from the point of view of Bunny Jnr. The boy, naïve to the world and who hero-worships his father, gives us an insight that turns the twisting tale of debauchery all too tragic.
We have the sense though, as a reader, that Bunny must reach his bitter conclusion, he must die, in order for the boy to survive, to be able to shine out from beyond the darkness that is his father. Interludes with Bunny’s own father, the elderly Bunny Munro Snr, who is dying of cancer, show all too clearly, the legacy passed from father to son in this family.
Bunny Munro does seek some sort of retribution for his lifestyle, albeit it all too late, with an assembly of all the women he has wronged. The reader is left with an overwhelming satisfaction that the despicable man has gotten the comeuppance he deserved and that perhaps, the young boy that we’ve come to care about, just may have escaped his poison.
Is The Death of Bunny Munro going to be everybody’s cup of tea? Absolutely not. The dark humour, the wit and the beautiful writing can only do so much to deflect the inexplicable horror of it all. Those who are easily offended will probably not read past the first page.
For my tastes though, this was a fantastic book. One with a well-formed plot, characters that were as real and multi-dimensional as any I’ve read and with the kind of writing that only a song-writer of his ilk could master.
I only hope that Kylie Minogue and Avril Lavigne, who are both mentioned with “love, respect and apologies” in Cave’s final acknowledgements, can see it the same way.
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