The Death of Bunny Munroe

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I guess it’s a little morbid, but I have a deep and startingly curious fascination about the way in which our brains process the world around, behind, and in front of us. Especially when it comes to books and movies. I love thinking and talking about the aspects of a book, or film, or piece of consumable culture that make us feel the way we do about it. The responses it inspires. And the way in which we store it away and then recall it later down the road. I was particularly interested in what my brain was doing in its compelling me to continue reading the book that I’ve been chipping away at all week. I’m still confused as to what was possessing me, compelling me, forcing me to continue turning pages because I can’t say that I liked this book at all.

The Death of Bunny Munroe tells the story of salesman and irresponsible cocksman, Bunny Munroe. Going door-to-door selling beauty products, Bunny has an uncanny magnetism that not only inspires ladies to buy what he's selling, but also go to bed with him. But Bunny’s insatiable appetite for women gets a rude shock when his wife commits suicide, leaving him with his nine year-old son and no idea what to do next. Unable to stay in their flat, Bunny takes his son on the road and tries to continue living as he has before. But something is wrong. Bunny is seeing his wife everywhere, his charms are suddenly not working, and the withdrawal symptoms are driving him insane.

This was absolutely a return to We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in that I pretty much had no idea what was going on from start to finish. Described as a ‘desperate man’s battle for redemption’ Bunny Munroe is a strange, graphic, and deeply unsettling read.

The second novel by Nick Cave, the book explores, in graphic and horrific detail, the themes of addiction, mortality, and the looming certainty, and fear, of death. Set in England’s south-coast, it’s a road-trip novel that turns the genre on its head by having the protagonists not so much run towards a bright future, but rather flee from a dark and maudlin past. Both Bunny and his son are strange, off-centre, and desperate characters; very hard to identify with and even harder to be on side with. The cloud of melancholy that constantly looms over them somehow looms over the reader too, thanks to Cave’s incredible talent with prose.

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Like And the Ass Saw the Angel, Cave’s prose in Bunny Munroe is incredible in the way that he can so forcefully create a lurid picture in the mind’s eye of the reader, practically kidnapping them and forcing them into the backseat of the Punto to travel with the antiheroes. Each terrible and confronting encounter that Bunny and his son have are happening to us as we read, which is what, I believe, makes this book so horrifically compelling! The rawness, the gore, and the festering and decaying of mortality/morality that is splattered across every page is disgusting, repulsive, sickening, but I couldn’t stop turning pages.

And then there are the poetic, ironic, and metaphoric techniques that Cave uses to bring depth, dimension, and even beauty to this wholly disgusting tale.

By the time I closed the cover, I was convulsing, my mind was awash in confusion, and the only feeling I could identify was one of dread and revolt. I did not like this book, I will not read it again, but I have to give Cave credit for somehow hijacking my mind and forcing me to feel this way through his incredible prose.

Author: Nick Cave, 2009

Published: The Text Publishing Company, Victoria, 2009