Customer Reviews

Death of Bunny Munro

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Bunny Munro, the hero of this somewhat strange novel, is a traveling salesman promoting his samples of beauty products to women in small towns around Brighton in Southern England. Visiting an oddly disparate collection of women he does much more than selling his wares. In his self-assessment he is the irresistible charmer and seducer, thanks in part to his "lovelock", that, heavily pomaded, winks enticingly at any woman he encounters. Since the suicide of his "beloved" wife Libby, his stable framework is crumbling. He feels constantly observed by somebody and suffers from premonitions of death... In desperation he hits the road to escape and to do the only thing he knows well...

Seen as a farce and satire on human, in particular male, behaviour, one might get some enjoyment out of reading the travails of Bunny and his women. The lurid descriptions, however, become predictable and repetitive... No doubt, he is a sex addict of a certain kind more than anything else; if no suitable object for his almost constant availability is in his field of vision, he gets himself into the mood for the next encounter by imagining Avril Lavigne's "mother of all" private parts.

I have to admit that this is not my kind of book. Still, I have to respect Cave's writing excellence when it comes to evoking the seedy to depressing atmosphere of the apartments, houses or restaurants and their neighbourhoods that Bunny visits. With a few deft strokes he also captures the essence of the people the salesman meets. When later on in the story he recalls images of his characters, and in particular the women's more or less attractive body parts, the reader will also remember the individuals and the encounters the hero had with them.

But, life is more complicated, exemplified by Bunny junior, Bunny's nine-year old quiet, encyclopedia-reading son who misses his mum terribly. He has to "learn the ropes" and travel with Bunny from one appointment to another, of course, sitting in the car outside. The father-son relationship, or the more or less successful efforts by both to have such a relationship, adds a more serious aspect to Cave's novel. Does it work? For me the relationship between the two did not salvage the book. Without giving away developments towards the end, one can say that roles between the two will change over time. A quote on the back book flap mentions Cormac McCarthy (and Franz Kafka!). Anybody who has read The Road (Movie Tie-in Edition 2009) (Vintage International) where the father-son relationship is central and also carries the novel beautifully, will find any such comparison here out of place. [Friederike Knabe]

This novel is bound to spark lots of different reactions because it is provocative and explicit and strange and dangerous and incredibly funny and genuinely challenging. But I hope that the beauty of the writing and the seriousness of the book's moral dimensions are not overlooked because of the "controversial" aspects of the novel. For this second novel by Nick Cave is a major piece of literature that makes so much of what is being written today in this country look anodyne and flaccid.

At the emotional heart of this death trip of a ride is this extremely tender and movingly captured relationship between the Bunny Munro of the title and his nine year old son Bunny Junior. It has real depth and is utterly convicing and so when you do get to the end of the rollercoaster you feel literally spent.

But along the way you will experience some of the sharpest and funniest writing you are likely to find this year. Fans of Cave's music will lap it up like cream (and the audio book which he has recorded with an accompanying soundtrack by him and fellow Bad Seed Warren Ellis) but it should also win over a lot of new fans because it is so damn good. The novel's protoganist, the travelling salesman Bunny Munro, is an unforgettable and utterly flawed and tragic anti-hero that is going to live forever.

Rock on Mr Cave and thanks for writing such a stunning book. And please don't leave it another twenty years before you give us a third novel!

OK, I've been a Nick Cave fan for many, many years now. Too many to claim. I read his first novel, And The Ass Saw the Angel, when I was in my twenties. I fell in love with Eucrid Eucrows' manic cataloging of random objects, his utterly absurd "aloneness" in a ficticious landscape that was a cross between the swampy American South of the early 20th century and the brutality of settlement life in early Australia.

And then came The Death of Bunny Munro, which I have now read in my early fourties. I found this new novel to be a relentless, one note narrative. Considering the energetic complexity of it's author, I was shocked to find the title character, Bunny Munro, to be so utterly lacking in depth. OK, we get it. Bunny's addiction to sex and self destruction is all consuming; at the peril of his wife, to the physical and psychological detriment of his son, and most certainly of his own soul. But this point is made glaringly evident within the first few chapters. From there, the story does not progress. This same dark chord is struck over and over in each successive chapter with the same effect on the reader. Bludgeoned, devastated, having lost all faith in humanity and the genetic bond between father and son, the chapters plod on and on. The reader is not expecting redemption at this point, just some other angle to the story, some irony, some progression, something. But it never comes.

The way The Death of Bunny Munro wraps up is remeniscent of Patrick Suskind's Perfume. In both novels, quite unredeemable characters get a very public, somewhat nonesensical comeuppance that could only exist in the rich fantasy life of its characters. Bunny's is consistently flat and predictable, whereas Jean Baptiste's leads the reader to some kind of absurd epiphany about the power of the most underexplored of the human senses.

Hopefully, Cave's third novel will be the charm.

Is the book pretentious? Yes of course! Nick Cave has gloried in the overly embellished cliche throughout his career. But this book is great because it is VERY funny. His writing is so much more selective, controlled and refined than his previous novel (When the Ass...) which got on my nerves because it was exactly the book I had expected from him at the time and read like he was just interested in spreading a large dollop of his public persona across the pages. But in Bunny he has created a surreal tale and a monstrous character - albeit a rather unlikely one - and I found I was not thinking on every page that this is Nick Cave writing. In other words, in spite of maintaining his extreme approach to narrative that characterises all his song writing from the Birthday Party days onwards, this book doesn't seem like Nick Cave exhibiting himself. It tells a sad and funny story, and it made me laugh, from start to finish. Yes, I agree with those reviewers who say it is not a deep or complex book, and it is certainly depraved. But like great comedy, it is also moving, tragic and memorable. Overall, fun.

Sorry, I loved And the Ass Saw the Angel and as a big Nick Cave fan I was predisposed to Bunny Munro. However, and to my surprise, I found it tedious and pointless. The main character is not interesting, and the story has no arc -- it's just a smear... If I needed to remind myself why I like Cave I'd read And the Ass again. That, like his music, is extraordinary. This is something else.

This novel left me crying for hours, i couldn't peel myself away from it, and read it rather quickly. I feel that this novel touched a part of me that had been locked away for years. Nothing has hit this close to home and described the relationship that i had with my father. I feel this could possibly be the best novel of this generation.

Nick Cave novels are rare birds: his last, to my knowledge, was a mud-soaked piece of Southern Gothic depravity from 1989 called And the Ass Saw the Angel, in itself a brilliant, unhinged piece of writing and in its way a perfect companion piece for Cave's music which at that time was exploiting Leadbelly's romantic outlaw legacy and turning out albums' worth of excellent murder ballads, mined from Mississippi earth, and burnishing the reputations of collaborators as unusual as Polly Harvey and Kylie Minogue in doing so.

If it seemed odd that an Australian should be one of the most dogged and purist perpetrators of the American romantic tradition, that was only until you saw Cave's screenplay, The Proposition, which renders his scorched-earth Australia like tones and makes a case for a rival tradition.

So The (lonesome?) Death of Bunny Munro, as a title and yea, even unto about half way down the first page, sounded like it would follow the same furrow: a doomed travelling salesman - so much Arthur Miller - in a washed-up hotel room, in Brighton, eviscerating his distant wife.

But did you see the dissonance there? *Brighton*?

I flipped ahead, before purchasing, just to check this was in fact Brighton, Arkansas, or some other such remote, exotic and God-forsaken place. But no, this is good old Brighton, UK, present day. And Bunny Munro is no Willie Loman. And this is, aside from its wilful and exuberant sordidity, a very different sort of Nick Cave novel from his last one.

As a rock musician, Nick Cave is smarter than your average bear (not hard, admittedly: the playful and extensive vocabulary of his lyrics has always attested to that) and here, Cave's linguistic invention is always on top form. This novel is over written with great zeal: deliberately and enjoyably - a talented writer consciously using a technique for a particular end, as opposed to the more common over-reach of an amateur.

Though its content ranges from icky to downright repulsive, Cave's delivery is witty enough to make it always entertaining and frequently funny. Former collaborator Minogue again makes an appearance, but this time we laugh (gently) at Kylie's expense (literally, she is the butt of the joke), and Cave apologises to her in his afterword, and to Avril Lavigne, who fares far worse at Cave's hands than the Where Are They Now file she's currently inhabiting would say she was entitled to.

So, unless you have a profound respect for Avril Lavigne, form excellent. Not so convinced about the substance, however.

For one thing, Bunny Munro has no plot to speak of: it is a simple downhill slide into oblivion. I fancy Cave might see it as a tragedy (I can't for the life of me work out what other motivation he'd have), but a tragedy requires a flawed hero who refuses a path to redemption at his own cost. There's no such dynamic here. Bunny Munro has no redeeming features; he's irredeemable and (so sayeth the first words of the book), doomed. There's no moral to be heeded here.

Nor are other available characters used to their potential. A murderous sex fiend, dressed as a devil, rampages down the country drawing ever nearer to Brighton, in a clear metaphorical parallel. But, just when it might get interesting (is this Bunny's doppelganger? Is this Bunny's fate? Will they confront each other?) the devil figure drops out of the story.

Bunny's son, Bunny junior, has an eye condition which Bunny wilfully ignores despite the boy's gentle reminders - I guess something statically figurative about that - but the condition gets no worse over the course of the novel. Bunny is dogged by constant interaction with a particular fleet of well-named lorries, but short of making the obvious point that Bunny is destined to be a "Dudman", it isn't clear what the point of these was either.

Basically, this isn't a story, as such. It's an expiration; a ghastly but meaningless descent into oblivion which happens to be queasily enjoyable.

There is some significance to be drawn from the fact that Irvine Welsh, whose novels tend to be of a piece (Filth particularly), was impressed. If that sort of thing floats your boat (it doesn't mine) you might be also. Otherwise, outside Cave's core fan base, Bunny Munro is likely to be of passing interest only.

Olly Buxton

I didn't do the usual research before buying this book, so it caught me off guard. I didn't expect it to be so sexual and so ...."man"ish. Made me wonder on more than one occasion what goes on Mr Cave's head??!?! More *prudish* readers could find it offensive as there is no shortage of descriptive phrases involving female private parts. But the on-road story of Bunny, a sex-addict door-to-door salesman, and his young son after the suicide of his wife kept me intrigued until the end. Bunny visually and progressively evolved before my eyes and I knew how it was going to end but wasn't sure how it was going to get there, which is cool thing. Not totally my thing but certainly an interesting ride...

This was a great disappointment. While Cave's first book was a literary masterpiece, this is nothing but poorly written vulgarity. There is nothing challenging about this tripe unless the other reviewer meant the boredom of reading the same words on everypage (I won't print those words since they titillate the uneducated masses). This book was as funny as a bad dirty joke that you've already heard, but this time it is told by your mother. The only good thing going for this book is that it is a quick read. I only hope that Cave wrote it on a dare. Read or reread "And the Ass saw the Angel", but whatever you do do not waste money on this title.

Nick Cave is a strange dude. Listen to his music and get back with me.

Nick Cave's new novel is a strange novel. I loved it. But then, I'm a bit strange myself.

Bunny Munro is God's gift to women. At least, that's what he thinks. Bunny trolls the English highways, keeping appointments with women who have expressed the desire to test his line of beauty products. Bunny is a traveling salesman. His only allegiance is to his own perpetual lust. Bunny can never get enough and he preys on his clientele.

There's also a Bunny Junior. Poor kid, nine years old, a brilliant mind, and a dad like this. We know that things won't end well. Cave makes that clear from the start. This is a morality lesson of Biblical proportions. And the porno aspects are so completely not titillating that most readers who dare to enter Cave's murky literary cave will exit exhausted. Perhaps, even delighted. Certainly not satisfied, in that lustful sense.

Are you strange? Enjoy.