Coming twenty years after his first novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, Nick Cave’s latest offering, The Death of Bunny Munro, is sure to shock and appall. Buckle up, you’re in for a bumpy ride.
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.
