FICTION: The Death of Bunny MunroBy Nick Cave, Canongate, 278pp, £16.99 HALFWAY THROUGH his life, musician and writer Nick Cave wandered out of the dark wood of the Nocturama period, junked posterity and austerity, and began to spew albums, screenplays and soundtracks (and in the case of Grinderman, sidetracks) at a rate of knots.
It was as if this long-time perfectionist grew weary of the notion of perfection and thereafter invested his work with an electric impatience. Everything he has done since 2004 bristles with urgency.
Cave's second novel in 20 years, The Death of Bunny Munro, was originally outlined as a screenplay entitled The Death Of A Ladies' Man, slated to be directed by Cave's longtime collaborator John Hillcoat and starring Ray Winstone as a cosmetics salesman who, after his wife's suicide, embarks on a skirt-chasing road trip with his hapless son in tow. Funding proved difficult and the project was shelved. When Hillcoat accepted an offer to direct a screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Cave reversed the usual trend by adapting his own screenplay into a novel.
This won't be the first place you'll have read that The Death Of Bunny Munrois of a piece with Grinderman songs such as No Pussy Blues. It revels in flaunting conventional notions of good taste, rejoicing in a sort of porno glossolalia. Cave has always loved language, but in his middle years he has become more inclined to rough it up. His 1989 debut novel, And The Ass Saw The Angel, consciously created a timeless world, an Antipodean Blood Meridian by way of Melville and the King James Bible.
These days he wallows in the filthy modern tide, drawing on the same style of absurdist journalism and radical, almost arbitrary, editing techniques that made last year's Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!album such a jolt. Through the lens of Bunny Munro, the 21st Century is rendered as a rinky-dink wasteland of council flats, burger joints and seaside resorts (Cave manages to make the Butlins motto "Our True Intent is all for Your Delight" sound positively sinister), populated by alco-pops Lolitas and hooded zombies in leisure suits.
The author takes obvious pleasure in purposefully mangling his language and scuffing borderline baroque long-line tumbles of words with the phrase “or something”, repeated as punctuation throughout the book. Nouns get unceremoniously verbed. He switches perspectives from Bunny Sr to Bunny Jr with sneaky ease. If most omniscient narration takes the form of a static overhead crane shot, this is a nimble digi-cam that ducks and dives and picks up the free indirect speech thought processes of its subjects. It’s a nifty little technique that allows Cave to retain all the foul-mouthed flavour of a first person Bunny narration, but also to switch points of view with impunity.
The Death of Bunny Munrois above all an extended riff on the rampant male libido at the point where it leaves the realms of joyous Dionysian appetite and edges into darker areas of neurosis and psychopathology. Bunny is addicted to sex, led around Brighton by his prodder, and this compulsion has made of him a miserable human being, lousy father and utterly reprehensible husband. Yes, Cave has a rare gift for black comedy, but also risks entering Viz territory – the reader spends much of the time peering through their fingers waiting for the book to cross the line into outright puerility. The author is to be commended that over 278 pages containing hundreds (if not thousands) of oinks, gags and synonyms for male and female genitalia, there are only a few lapses of judgment.
In truth, the book's tone has much more in common with the dark wit and off-season seaside melancholia of Bruce Robinson's lovely novel The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penmanthan brutalists such as Ellis or Welsh. The narrative is fraught with impending doom (hustled along in no small way by a macabre serial killer sub-sub-plot), the same insidious, everyday apocalypse that haunted songs such as Messiah Wardand Abattoir Blues. Bunny Munro's beast moves its slow haunches not through deserts and canyons, but filling stations and hotel rooms: "The wasps are preparing themselves – he thinks. He remembers the burning West Pier and his blood runs cold and he thinks – the starlings are circling. He closes his eyes and imagines for a split second a rush of perilous and apocalyptic visions – planes falling from the sky; a cow giving birth to a snake; red snow; an avalanche of iron maidens; a vagina with its mouth stapled shut; a phallus shaped like a mushroom cloud – and Bunny shudders, checks his teeth in the mirror and thinks – Man, where did that come from?"
The Death of Bunny Munrois an impudent novel, not just in terms of its scatology, but also its refusal to psychoanalyse the protagonist's compulsion to nail everything in a skirt (and when he's not, beating off at the thought of it).
This is Cave giving the finger to screenwriting guru notions of character arc modulation or redemption. There are no back stories or sob stories or attempts to apologise or politicise. Bunny is what he is. He not only screws all around him, but knows, in the cosmic sense, that he himself is utterly screwed. In this regard, The Death of Bunny Munro, for all its English seaside trappings, might be Nick Cave's most mordantly Australian work to date.
Peter Murphy is a novelist and journalist. His first book, John the Revelator, was published by Faber