With his philandering ways largely responsible for his wife’s suicide, Bunny Munro, a sex crazed traveling salesman, takes to the road with his nine year old son, Bunny Junior. While Bunny flaunts his wares to lonely housewives along the British coast and engages in lots (and lots) of meaningless animalistic sex with participants both willing and unwilling, Junior sits in the car reading his encyclopedia and seeing his dead mother everywhere. What follows is an attempt to explore grief as experienced by a misogynist sexual predator and his innocent, admiring son. Dirty, degrading and depressing, Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro is a difficult book to like, and Bunny Munro a detestable protagonist.
Bunny sighs and wonders what he is doing. Then it comes to him – he is here to sell stuff. He closes his eyes and composes himself and approximates a person who has charm and who is in control. This is not as easy as it sounds because Bunny feels, in an oblique way, that a kind of lunacy has come to visit and decided to stay until all the lights go out.
The Bunnies road trip through England and their encounters with a wide array of women is almost mundane, except for the elder Bunny’s voracious sexual appetite which borders on being psychotically obsessive. There is no time where Bunny is thinking about anything other than the promise of copulation, his imagination constantly runs rampant. Something as simple as a song on the radio requires immediate gratification. He seems to not even notice his son, or recognize their predicament, and neither of them have any idea of what to do next. Bunny Junior is almost adorable in his naivete, his presence is the novel’s one saving grace.
The subplot about the horned serial killer could have been integrated a little more cohesively. Is the horned killer supposed to be a mirror of Bunny, what Bunny could potentially be like if he too possessed an inclination toward sexual violence? Their paths seem to be eerily similar, and I’m surprised that more of a connection isn’t made between them. The late introduction of Bunny’s terminally ill father, Bunny Senior, also feels somewhat forced. The relationship, or lack of, between Bunny and Junior already hints at the damage inflicted on the young by the neglect/misunderstanding of the previous generation; is the volatile Bunny Senior presented as a precursor to this? Does Bunny act and think how he does because of his strained relationship with his own father? Again, this element of the story is introduced much too late to really expose much, Bunny has already lost all grip on reality at this point.
The novel takes a sharp turn for the fantastic when Bunny redeems himself in limbo as he lies dying on the road after having been hit by a cement mixer (I hope that isn’t too much of a spoiler, but considering the title of the novel, it’s likely you’ve already guessed how it ends.) The carnival atmosphere of his apology and forgiveness from the army of idealized women just reaffirms that Bunny is a sanctimonious creep. This imagined redemption, as well as the dreamed penetration by the devil/horned serial killer, collide in attempt toward the biblical which achieves little in terms of catharsis or relevance.
Despite moments of the darkest possible shade of black humour, The Death of Bunny Munro is a disconcerting novel with more references to Avril Lavigne’s vagina than anyone could ever need.
Book Loot: Week Ending September 20th, 2009
A very small loot indeed this week!
- And the Ass Saw the Angel by Nick Cave
- Generation A by Douglas Coupland (review)
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Oh, 3 for 2 Popular Penguin deal, you’re just too good! My copy of Brideshead is a bit battered – but it’s also a Penguin orange edition, from 1951. 1951! So, a replacement/extra copy was much needed. I started reading Dunces a few years ago, but never got around to finishing it, I think I had to return it to the library before I was done. And, I don’t think I’ve ever been as ecstatic over a book as I was when I received a review copy of Douglas Coupland’s upcoming release in the mail. Very exciting!
