If you haven’t heard of Nick Cave or his Bad Seeds yet I implore that you go and have a listen. Well, provided you like something a bit different with dark lyrics and scratchy, catchy, spooky tunes. Nick Cave and his band, the Bad Seeds have done a number of albums and I saw them last year at Glasto (though with the wrong crowd watching). He’s also created a couple of notable soundtrack albums with his friend (I assume) and fellow Bad Seed Warren Ellis (Rasputin-faced genius fiddle player who incidentally scares the shit out of me). These soundtracks include The Proposition (2006), The Assassination of Jesse James (2007) and more recently The Road (2009). He’s also worked with Kylie Minogue and PJ Harvey.
The Death of Bunny Munro is Nick Cave’s second novel following his unrelated 1989 début book “And the Ass Saw the Angel” (which, god-willing, is on its way through the post as we speak). You may need a strong stomach to digest this book, but if you’ve read Trainspotting and/or Porno by Irvin Welsh, you should be desensitized enough to get through it just fine. Bunny Munro’s brilliance comes with Cave’s descriptive genius – if you’ve heard his music it should be quite easy to imagine the fine arrangement of words Cave has for us here. It’s a moving and in places terrifyingly funny book (I caught myself guiltily “LOL”ing at some of the filthier portions more than once).
The story sees sex-crazed and morally-challenged Bunny Munro, a door-to-door beauty product salesman and his son, Bunny Junior travelling around Brighton in the wake of Bunny’s wife, Libby’s suicide. Her death – unquestionably a culmination of Bunny’s unrelenting adultery and a lifetime worth of lies, triggers Bunny’s eventual decline and fall.
As they cruise around in their Punto, Bunny goes door-to-door selling products from his suitcase and pretty well bonking (or filling?) every unfulfilled female he meets. But things are changing. A man dubbed the Horned Killer on telly terrorises women with a trident and works his way through the country to Brighton. Libby’s mum and Bunny’s dad plague him, but worst of all he keeps seeing his dead wife. Of course he still sees the lady-bits of every woman he meets in his head too, and some from women he has never met (namely Kylie Minogue’s and Avril Lavigne’s), but he can’t help feeling a sense of impending doom.
Conversely Bunny Junior is a bookish, gangly and neglected nine-year-old, seemingly unblemished by his father’s extra-marital frivolities and regular barrages of expletives. This comes as a bit of a relief, and despite (thankfully) not knowing quite what the man’s up to he worships his dad. The unorthodox, negligent and yet very special father-and-son relationship within The Death of Bunny Munro reminds me a lot of the two central characters in Mick Foley’s (yes, the Wrestler) book, Tietam Brown. And forget the equation wrestler+authorofbook=shite for a moment because it’s an amazingly well crafted little tome. But I digress, that’s the wrong bloody book. The Death of Bunny Munro is great too, just go and read it.
I was going to quote-ify this post but I thought I’d just attach this clip of Nick Cave reading chapter 3. Warning, it’s pretty (i.e. a lot) perverse and filled with expletives. You’ve been warned!
The Death of Bunny Munro, chapter 3, read by Nick Cave:
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