When you’re sitting at a bar reading a DayGlo pink
hardbound book, everyone thinks you’re reading something dirty. They’re
right. Nick Cave’s new novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, is pink,
pink, pink for a reason. Originally written as a screenplay for
director John Hillcoat after their successful team-up on the 2005
western The Proposition, the sweetly sordid Bunny is
Cave’s second novel—written 20 years after his first, And the
Ass Saw the Angel.
Bunny Munro is the world’s horniest traveling salesman. He’s more
wolf than rabbit—as every woman he sees becomes a walking,
breathing sex doll. Everything is erotically charged for him: “Groups
of scissor-legged school things with their pierced midriffs, logoed
jogging girls, happy, rumpy dog-walkers, couples actually copulating on
the summer lawns, beached pussy prostrate beneath the erotically shaped
cumulus….” In essence, Bunny is a monster. A sex maniac who sells
beauty products door to door in Southern England, he invariably beds
most of the housewives he encounters.
Meanwhile, Bunny’s son Bunny Jr. is a quiet, bookish nine-year-old
who looks after his mentally disturbed mom, Libby, while his father is
away on “business.” But after a particularly prolonged absence from
Bunny Sr., Libby kills herself, leaving both father and son to grieve
in their respective manners—rutting and reading—as they
embark on a sales trip through English seaside towns and roads.
It’s in this father-son relationship that Bunny moves from being
just a scintillating, Irvine Welsh-esque villain to a fully formed,
charismatic character of interest. Bunny eventually achieves a level of
redemption through his love of Bunny Jr., and combined with the horrors
he inflicts on the women of the English countryside, it makes for an
interesting dichotomy of benign and demented. This shift from Cocksman
to Salesman to Deadman—as the parts of the book are
titled—make The Death of Bunny Munro a discrete Nick Cave
work, if not a discreet one. While in the novel the following questions
are directed at Bunny, they seem more apropos for the singular Cave:
“‘Hey, man, I love the quiff. What are you? A jokeman? A magician? A
singer?'” a man asks Bunny. “‘Yeah, something like that,'” he says.