Book review: ‘The Death of Bunny Munro’

THE DEATH OF BUNNY MUNRO

Nick Cave

Faber & Faber

288 pages

There are few antiheros as loathsome as Bunny Munro, the protagonist of Nick Cave’s second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro. A monstrously pathetic (and unaccountable successful) cosmetic salesman, Bunny Munro seems to have spent his life careening from date rape to date rape, fueled by Scotch, cigarettes, and cocaine. The novel opens with Bunny’s wife’s suicide – due to Bunny’s more unsavory foibles, it’s worth mentioning – and even this doesn’t calm him down. If anything, it lends his debauches a certain hellish urgency as he packs up his nine-year-old son, Bunny Jr., and takes off on a sales trip in his bright yellow Punto.

Nick Cave provides Bunny’s string of nauseating conquests in riotously funny detail. The prose is deliciously funny and artfully profane. Take, for instance, this description of one of Bunny’s wife’s friends, whom he spots at his wife’s funeral:

Patsy “Bad Vibes” Parker throws Bunny incriminatory looks every so often, but Bunny expects nothing less. Patsy Parker has never liked Bunny and at every opportunity she can find alerts him to the fact. Patsy is short, with an overdeveloped backside, and to compensate for her low stature wears high heels much of the time on her tiny undersize feet. When she would come to visit Libby, she would walk down the gangway in an obscene and purposeful trot, reminding Bunny of one of the three little pigs, probably the one who made its house out of bricks. This is particularly pertinent, as she had once, in a fit of pique over some porny comment she had overheard him make about the walking f-fest Sonia Barnes from No. 12, called Bunny a wolf. Bunny assumed she meant the cartoon wolf, all drooling tongue and bulging eyeballs, and had actually taken this remark as a compliment. Each time he’d see her he would do his “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down” routine. Bunny considers rolling out his tongue and bugging his eyeballs at her but realizes with a certain satisfaction that he can’t be f—.

It’s a scene that provides a pretty good glimpse into the whole of the novel. It’s cartoonish, brutal, sordid, and degenerate, sure, but it’s also tremendously funny.

Of course, anyone who is even remotely familiar with Nick Cave already has a pretty good idea as to the thematic bent of the novel. Whether writing screenplays, novels, or songs, sex and death – the grislier the better – form Cave’s raison d’être. And there is, as always, a religious aspect. The devil stalks the pages, brought to life as a minor character and providing Bunny one of his more, shall we say, uncomfortable moments in this protracted death of a ladies’ man.

That said, the novel can hardly be called predictable. Cave’s imagination, though often preying (praying?) on the same set of core themes, is endlessly fertile. As is his sense of empathy. He is ironically among the most compassionate of artists, finding worth and even occasional redemption in the worst miscreants, criminals, and misogynists the world has to offer. He never seeks to excuse Bunny Munro, but his presentation is unnervingly affectionate. Yes, Bunny is vile, and yes, he has to die – I don’t think I’m giving away anything there – but he is also a member of our common humanity, as disturbing as that may be.

And then there is Bunny Jr., who, after his mother’s suicide, attends Bunny on the majority of his debauches. Bunny Jr., in the words of Cave, “loves his dad with all his heart and he wouldn’t in a million years swap him for another one. Who would? Like when he is funny, he is an absolute scream – look at him now with all the busted refrigerators and bathtubs and junk, with his trousers around his ankles. Tell me a dad who’d do that?” Bunny Jr. is the heart of the novel, and it is exactly for that reason that Bunny must die, to free the boy from the hell of his father. A hell which, as we come to understand when we meet Bunny’s own father, Bunny Sr., has been passed down father-to-son for generations. This does not, perhaps, make for the most endearing of father/son novels ever written. But in the human wreckage Cave describes, it is perfectly appropriate.

Moreover, as Bunny’s character unwinds, slipping and further and further into his complete breakdown, it’s nearly impossible not to be impressed by Cave’s feat, managing to pull off a character as terrible and ridiculous as Bunny, and to portray his implosion as convincingly as he does. And by the end of the novel, when Bunny dies — and again, I don’t think this is a spoiler — the reader’s sigh of relief is not entirely unsympathetic. Which may be the greatest feat of all.

Benjamin Whitmer is a Denver area author.