The Death of Bunny Munro
Nick Cave
Canongate Books (UK)
Faber & Faber (US)
2009
Bunny Munro has been out there for over 10 years, and was always high on my ‘to read’ list. After all, I like Nick Cave’s music (The Bad Seeds) and I like his movies (The Proposition). He’s got 17 albums, two films, and at least two books. He is a polymath.
Cave doesn’t hesitate to make demands of his audience, and you need to approach his work with a strong need to think about and feel what he is communicating. It’s multi-layered and unique. Indeed, that may be why it took me so long to get around to Bunny Munro—good old fashioned intellectual cowardice.
Bunny is a short (308 pages) and relatively straightforward read. It focuses on a man, Bunny Munro, and his nine year old son, Bunny Munro Junior. As you might expect, there’s a lot going on between the lines, but even a superficial reading will give the reader a coherent and resolved story.
But it is a challenging and disturbing read because Nick Cave. If he had written Peter Rabbit, the story would have centered on how Peter and his siblings ruined and eventually killed Farmer McGregor and his family by stripping their food supply out from under them.
Bunny Munro is perhaps the most reprehensible character in modern fiction. An out-of-control sex addict, his depredations push his wife to suicide, leaving him with his nine-year-old son, whom he neglects disgracefully. Bunny is a traveling salesman specializing in feminine beauty projects, which is a bit like putting a pedophile in charge of the local day care.
It’s easy to dislike Bunny. He’s a disgusting person who destroys many lives and has no real emotional attachment to those around him, not even his son. He slips out and gets laid during his wife’s funeral.
But as the story goes on the reader starts developing sympathy and even a bit of understanding for Bunny. No, his behavior doesn’t improve—if anything it gets worse, and there is nothing redemptive. It’s clear his example is rubbing off on his son, which is horrifying. But it’s Cave’s substantial skill as a writer that allows the reader to really see the state of Bunny’s existence, tawdry and vile as it is, through Bunny’s own eyes. Cane doesn’t even use the gimcrack writer’s device of self-justifications—Bunny knows he’s doing wrong, and generally doesn’t give a rat’s ass. But as you read, you become Bunny. And yeah, that’s a disturbing experience.
Bunny dies (yeah, well, that particular spoiler is right there in the title, innit?) and in his dying light has a vast narcissistic fantasy in which all his victims or subjects forgive him and love him forever, and so of course he runs out and fucks the whole lot of them while his son watches admiringly. That’s about as close to a cheap gimmick to get the reader to like Bunny as you’re going to get.
The level of the writing is astonishing, reminding me at various points of the best of Heller, Vonnegut and Gaiman. There’s an underlying current of absurdity that takes what might otherwise be a distressing and depressing read and make it a somewhat enjoyable white water ride through the mind of a very different kind of person. At least, you hope Bunny is different.
Add this to the bucket list of books you need to read before you die. You won’t be sorry.