Bunny Munro is not a nice guy. A relentless misogynist, his infidelities cause his wife Libby to commit suicide in the first few chapters, and the rest of the novel is spent peddling his seedy wares around Brighton with the helpless Bunny Junior in tow. The word ‘explicit’ doesn’t really do this book justice, it is not for the faint of heart, but then Cave’s music is hardly for the squeamish.

We’re presented with a pretty loathsome character, but a character that everyone can relate to on some level, at least according to Cave. In a recent interview with David Peace he said, ‘What I wanted to try and do was create a character that men recognised, and to create a monster… women also recognised men in this character, or something they’d always suspected about men.’ Much of the debate concerning the novel has centred around this critique of masculinity, of how men define themselves. This position of a travelling salesman was also famously used to comment on manliness in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which has similar father-son, men-family and men-labour themes. The salesman is a charlatan, a pusher of snake oil, as Bunny himself admits:

‘So what do you go and do, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.
‘Well, you’ve got to have something they think they need, you know, above all else.’
‘And what’s that, Dad?’
‘Hope… you know… the dream. You’ve got to sell them the dream.’

This is a stark contrast to Bunny’s father, a former antiques dealer.

‘Your fucking Dad, I tried to teach him the business…’
‘Come on, Dad,’ says Bunny.
‘And he ends up peddling toilet brushes!’
‘Beauty products.’
‘Door to fucking door,’ snarls the old man, contemptuously.
‘By appointment,’ says Bunny.
‘Fucking amateur.’
‘I work through a reputable company,’ says Bunny.
‘You’re the bloody Bog Roll Man.’

If your job forces you all over the country, how can you be the father and husband that society expects you to be? If the market for manual labour has tried up, how can you be the epitome of hardy, practical masculinity? As a child in the pool at a Butlins holiday resort, the young Bunny finds meaning and self-definition in his relationships with the opposite sex.

‘I knew that I had this power… this special thing that all the other bastards who were flopping around in the pool trying to impress the girls didn’t have… I had this gift… a talent… and it was in that moment that I knew what I was put on this stupid fucking planet to do…’

Granted, Bunny doesn’t exactly bemoan the condition of the travelling salesman, he’s too busy sleeping with the customers, but the fact that society has produced this caste of men is telling in itself.

Opinion over, now onto format. The choice. Firstly, check out all these amazing covers from the book’s publishers around the world, some really great work there. The audiobook cds come in cases covered in Nick Cave’s scrawled notes for the novel, and it’s really interesting to see some of the horrific stuff that didn’t quite make it into the book! The audio is also using spatialised sound effects, giving an immersive 3d experience if you wear headphones, and is accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Cave and fellow Bad Seed Warren Ellis. Last, but by no means least, is the stunning iPhone app. The audio is fully synchronised with the text, so you can swap from reading to listening at the click of a button; it’s got a really intuitive tilt-to-scroll feature, great for giving your thumb a rest; and it’s bundled with eleven videos of Nick Cave reading the book. Once you’ve seen his expansive, emotive gestures you’ll wish he’d been filmed reading the entire thing. Finally, an ebook with some bite! There’s a sample version as well, first three chapters, give it a shot, it’s a really enjoyable way of consuming a book.

The Strain is quick to debunk some pre-conceived notions we might have about the children of the night:

“Garlic has certain interesting immunological properties and can be useful in its own right. So its presence in the mythology is biologically understandable, at any rate. But crucifixes and holy water?” He shrugged. “Products of their time. Products of one Victorian author’s fevered Irish imagination, and the religious climate of the day.”

If you’ve seen Blade II, which Del Toro directed, you’ll be vaguely familiar with the unusual physiology of these vampires, and the authors clearly use this film as a platform upon which to base some more bizarre physical traits, but I won’t spoil these for you.

Another particularly refreshing aspect is the perspective from which we as readers view the narrative. Vampire literature traditionally draws from a limited pool of protagonist types; I’ve had my fill of brooding vampires and their equally self-centred hunters, lone individuals who barely have to interact with the world around them, but this book is different. Hogan and Del Toro’s hero is a middle-aged man struggling through divorce proceedings while trying to maintain a normal relationship with his young son. Alright, so he’s also the head of a bioterrorism response unit, but apart from that he’s like all of us: weak, scared and human.

Therein lies the true difference between this novel and the majority of the vampiric canon, the supernatural is really just a foil for humanity, we are the central players. Much like Pan’s Labyrinth, another of Del Toro’s, it’s humanity that causes the worst atrocities, not the terrifying fantasy world that we sometimes inhabit. As a vampire says to one of the central characters, a former inmate in an Austrian concentration camp during the Second World War:

“But why destroy me, boy? Why am I so deserving of your wrath, when around you you find even more death in my absence?”

Set in New York, a city trying to build over the scars of 9/11, the outbreak of vampirism is initially mistaken for a bioterrorist attack, or the beginnings of some new epidemic, the implication being that human beings could easily have caused as much carnage without the help of their vitamin D-deficient cousins. Scarily enough, once people start to realise what’s happening, there’s a perverse pleasure in defending oneself from former loved ones and acquaintances. Annoying neighbours, smug co-workers, even estranged spouses, all are dispatched with an eerie relish.

As one would expect from a director turned writer, pacing and description is bang on; the writing is so seamless you can hardly tell it was a collaborative effort; and it actually made me afraid of the dark again, which is surely the ultimate achievement for such a work. Inevitably, however, we must turn to the question of a future film adaptation, and what effect this had had on the writing. As already mentioned, it’s a vividly descriptive book, and the build-up is perfect, but to what degree one can differentiate this from plain good writing is hard to tell. One thing to note is that the way the chapters are split up, to me, seemed cinematic, almost scene-like, but your mileage may vary. Whatever the balance, I wouldn’t be surprised if this trilogy ended up on the silver (!) screen at some point in the not-too-distant future.

PS the audio version is narrated by Ron Perlman, long-time Del Toro collaborator, which got me excited.

*Note, this post contains discussion of the most recent Transformers movie, so if you don’t want some spoilers you might not want to read on.*

Megatron had to undergo a few changes before reappearing on the big screen. For a start, this massive machine could no longer transform into a pistol; apparently modern movie-goers wouldn’t be able to accept this. Sure, a giant cube could shrink into one the size of your head, that’s believable. Grumble. Anyway, much as I like the old Megatron, I can’t deny that the new one is pretty menacing. Again, though, Bay’s attempts to make him even more realistic leave me cold – old-school Megatron could be mean enough without drenching an IMAX camera in spittle. No, my problem with the new Decepticons in general, and their leader in particular, is that they seem to be so readily expendible. Granted, they don’t have a few series to develop all of the characters fully, but shouldn’t the mighty Megatron be a bit more hardcore? In the first film he spends about a quarter of an hour wiping the floor with Optimus Prime’s shiny metal ass and then he’s melted by the Beef, and in the second film super-Prime dismantles him in less than a minute! Other Decepticons get even less screen time, causing mild carnage before being turned into scrap so quickly that you actually start to feel sorry for them! You really can’t have villains so weak that they make the good guys seem over-righteous.

Starscream, Megatron’s not-so-loyal lieutenant, another face with too much going on, but looks plenty evil, fine. He suffers from chronic under-development. In the original series he’s always trying to assume leadership of the Decepticons, through any underhanded means necessary. Something that surprised be with the second of the two films was that none of the other Decepticons had made a play for power after Megatron’s demise. They’re just so limited.

I actually struggled to find another Decepticon from the first of the new movies that was worthy of mention, so I had to resort to Devastator from the latest film. He’s a mega-bot made up of five or six normal-sized Decepticons, good opportunity for a pretty cool bad guy, huh? Wrong. He spends a fair amount of time inhaling sand, gets beaten up by two tiny, racially stereotyped Autobots, and then gets blasted with a rail gun fired by some nameless extra twenty miles away. What a disappointment. I mean, what’s he even meant to be? The picture’s not the greatest, but watch the film and you’ll see. Wait, am I advertising that film now?

Next week’s love interests, humans and optional extras, as requested.

It’s partly to do with age, obviously; not many kids today will have seen the classic animated movie or series, despite both being far more readily available now than they were a few years ago. On a simple design level, though, these new ultra-realistic Transformers are just so ugly! Part of what made the original series and movie so compelling for me was that there was something human in these machines, both visibly and emotionally. Bay has tried to recreate this feeling, but no amount of spittle, re-focusing irises or eyebrow movements fully convinced me of his machines’ humanity. It’s almost too visceral, comically so.

Without giving in to the nerdrage, and you must understand the self restraint that takes me, let’s look at the design of our protagonists, starting, of course, with Optimus Prime.

There’s so much happening on the face of the new Prime, each part of his face vying for my attention. Compare this to the spartan design of the original Autobot leader, basically a helmeted human face.

Let’s look at Ironhide now, Prime’s second in command. I don’t know about you, but just from looking at the humanoid form of the new Ironhide I can’t immediately tell what kind of vehicle he is, something the original clearly doesn’t suffer from. What’s with that face? Where’s the humanity? Can’t beat a low-detail human face with a bright red helmet in my opinion.

With Bumblebee, though, you’ve got to hand it to the new turks, they’ve really done a great job. Not only did they pay homage to his original car in the 2007 movie, they also realised that the helmeted look was the way to go. The car doors protruding from his back remind me of the wings of his namesake and is a look sported by a lot of the original Autobots, but let’s be honest, you’d have to have done pretty badly not to improve on the original Bumblebee – what’s with those horns?

Next post we’ll do the Decepticons, don’t you worry.

Superstition is, I think, something that most of us court at one time or another, I used to believe in what I liked to call the ‘cosmic seesaw’. This meant that if something bad happened to me I could shrug it off, the seesaw would have to bring me something good in return, which was comforting. However, if something good happened to me I could never fully enjoy it – the seesaw giveth, the seesaw taketh away. It’s kind of like karma, only the seesaw doesn’t give a damn if you’re naughty or nice.

With that in mind, I can understand part of Joan Didion’s mindset in The year of magical thinking, which details the year following her husband’s death. For her, ‘magical thinking’ is her rational mind attempting to assimilate her loss: if she’d read the signs she could have prevented it; and if she were to perform the correct rituals she might be able to bring him back.

‘I could not give away the rest of his shoes.
I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if he was to return.’

I often struggle with so-called mourning literature as it must, necessarily, be specific; it makes me an unwilling voyeur intruding on a life that I ultimately have no part or interest in. I feel like a fraud for glossing over the details of a life so that I can get to the parts where something is actually communicated between writer and reader. More than once I determined to abandon this book to its grief, but for some reason I could not.

What is grief? I’ve been to the funerals of grandparents, but no matter how close to them I was, their deaths did not cause this utter dislocation of the everyday that Didion talks about. I realised that my notions of grief have, perhaps naturally, come from literature, television and film; and that grief is for me, in a sense, unreal.

‘We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.’

Is grief something that culture simply cannot communicate, whatever the medium, or is it our inability to comprehend that is at fault? No matter how much I feel I’ve taken away from this book, will I have any clearer a picture of what grief is?

‘Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.’

This isn’t a book that will give you any of the answers, and, unlike many others, it doesn’t pretend to. It is a eulogy for a man, a marriage and a way of life; all three perhaps taken for granted at one time or another, but who among us cannot say the same? Beyond the name-dropping, the illustrious career, the holidaying in Malibu and Honolulu, this book earnestly tries to provide some perspective on the nature of human existence. We’re not in control, no matter how much we like to think we are; you can read the signs and enact the rituals, but

‘Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands vanish, rooms get forgotten.’

Our time here is brief, the duration of our stay not of our choosing. It’s sometimes helpful to be reminded that our lives are not constants, that the world will quite happily go along without us, ‘As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end’. I won’t necessarily remember this state of mind tomorrow, or next week, but for brief moments this book gave me fleeting glimpses of clarity and perspective, which I guess is as much as any of us can hope for.