By: Clay Adamczyk
Dark imagery, sex and violent sounds go hand-in-hand with the Birthday Party, Bad Seeds and Grinderman frontman Nick Cave not only in his song, but in his fiction work as well. It has been 20 years since Cave’s literary debut with And the Ass Saw the Angle (Black Spring Press, 1989) but now Cave has unleashed The Death of Bunny Munro (Faber & Faber, 2009) upon the world. He must have felt the world was finally ready.
The story follows title character Bunny Munro, a lothario, alcoholic, and sex addict through his downward spiral and inevitable death. His womanizing drives his ailing wife Libby to suicide and Bunny is left to the impossible task (to him, anyway) of tending to their nine-year-old son Bunny Junior. At her funeral, Bunny is stared down by all of Libby’s friends who rightly blame him, but the most grief is from his mother-in-law who actually clenches her teeth and mutters swears at him. This does not deter Bunny from sneaking out of church to masturbate.
Bunny Jr. misses his mother and thinks he sees her everywhere, while Bunny feels haunted by Libby to the point of her possessing him as he dives deeper into his addictions. He can no longer live in his apartment and does not know what to do with or how totake care of his son, so he decides to “show him the ropes”and go on the road selling beauty products. “Showing him the ropes” always meant Bunny Jr. must wait in the Punto while Bunny tries to seduce the client. Some fall for his classic charm, while others break his nose. Jr. loves and looks up to his father, but he is not ignorant to his dad’s shortcomings. Jr. thinks to himself that “he is sick to death of adults – police officers with truncheons and creeps in white tracksuits, zodiac-symbol-wearing wackos and women who crow like roosters, fat men in dresses and mothers who go and kill themselves.” He then “wonders, in a fury, where his fucking father is.”
Cave’s writing is a little sadistic but wonderfully descriptive. His characters are deep, and effortlessly draw the reader into Bunny Jr’s delusions of seeing his mother and experience Bunny’s anxiety and rock bottom fall to death. Bunny is a modern day Hank Chinaski and the writing style is easily comparative to the that of Charles Bukowski. The Death of Bunny Munro is a road story unlike any other, and Nick Cave has clearly bridged the gap between musician and author, and between classic and cult classic. Not a book to be overlooked.
The Death of Bunny Munro” is available now.
