Cave's bunny boiler

Photo: Steve Baccon

Nick Cave: not prepared to compromise on content.

The Death of Bunny Munro, Text Publishing, $37.

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BUNNY Munro is a salesman, a "cocksman" and a dead man.

We know a lot about him before we even start reading this, Nick Cave's second novel.

We know, for instance, that Bunny Munro is going to die. The spectacularly in-your-face cover of this book, by W H Chong, tells us something else: Bunny is obsessed with sex.

But those few facts do not do Bunny Munro justice because he is one of the most egotistical, monomaniacal, self destructive and self-absorbed characters to grace modern literature.

In and around Brighton, England, Munro sells beauty products to people without hope. He fools himself that he sells them dreams "romantic, old fashioned, sensuous ... Barry White in a bottle, this stuff ... with a hint of the East". But in reality, he's peddling third-rate trash for his employer, Eternity Enterprises, and getting laid a lot on the side.

Bunny shags prostitutes in hotel rooms, hotel staff in the morning, lonely widows and single mothers. He drives around thinking about one thing and one thing only: vagina. He tries to create erotic fantasies, but fails through a lack of imagination, always ending up in the same place. He is particularly obsessed by Kylie Minogue's and Avril Lavigne's.
Bunny's obsession is also the cause of his downfall, ably assisted by massive amounts of alcohol. Left alone by his wife's suicide he takes his son, Bunny Junior, on one final roadtrip to "show him the ropes" and to "shake the money tree", as Bunny's father, an antiques conman now dying of cancer, had taught Bunny.

In just three days, haunted, drunk and still obsessed, Munro descends into hell, taking his son for the ride. Spectres and ghosts abound, the ghost of his wife, a strange devil in horns in the media, killing people with a pitchfork and heading south. Heading for Bunny?

Towards the end he becomes a horror to the women he once wooed. They quite literally flee him in the streets. As one of musician Cave's songs says, he has the "No pussy blues".

The Death of Bunny Munro is a world away from Cave's first novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, a merry tale of animal torture, child beating and religion published way back in 1989. Whereas that was Faulkneresque in its use of different viewpoints and the density of the prose, Bunny Munro is lean and driven by plot and character.

It would be an easy read if it wasn't for the content. On that, Cave is clearly not prepared to compromise. Cave is a writer who has to have something to say, and when so many don't that is refreshing.

And despite knowing so much at the start of the book, it remains full of surprises, laughs and horrors. It also rings true. Although we may not, thankfully, have a Bunny Munro in our lives, we all have train-wreck friends and relatives, people who, in many different ways, seem unable to beat their own demons except by death. The Death of Bunny Munro doesn't have the writerly brilliance of Cave's earlier novel, but it is sharp, smart and funny as hell.

Rob O'Neill is editor of Computerworld.

- © Fairfax NZ News