Book Around the Corner

The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave (2009) French title: Mort de Bunno Munro.

‘Listen, you loopy old cunt. My wife just hung herself from the security grille in my own bloody bedroom. My son is upstairs and I haven’t the faintest fucking idea what to do with him. My old man is about to kick the bucket. I live in a house I’m too spooked to go back to. I’m seeing fucking ghosts everywhere I look. Some mad fucking carpet-muncher broke my nose yesterday and I have a hangover you would no fucking believe. Now, are you gonna give me the key to room seventeen or do I have to climb over this counter and knock your fucking dentures down your throat?’

No need to sum up the events that brought Bunny Munro to his last rope, they’re all listed in this quote.

When the book opens, we meet Bunny Munro, salesman who visits his prospects at home and sells them beauty products. The first chapters get us acquainted with Bunny, a man obsessed with sex. He’s an addicted womanizer and the ladies seem to fall for his charms. Still, we’re a bit struck by his looks and wonder how he’s such a ladies’ man.

Bunny opens the front door. He has removed his jacket and now wears a cornflower blue shirt with a design that looks like polka dots but is actually, on more careful inspection, antique Roman coins that have, if you get right up close, tiny and varied vignettes of copulating couples printed on them.

Right. See what I mean about the sex-obsessed mind? We soon understand that he’s a very unreliable narrator. The book has three parties, aptly entitled Cocksman (where Bunny shows us the extent of his uncontrollable sex-drive), Salesman (He’s on a tour to see clients with his son in tow after his wife’s death) and Deadman (cf the title of the book).

In Part One, the reader is amused by Bunny’s antics. In Part Two, the reader starts feeling very sorry for his son, Bunny Junior, understands the reasons of his wife’s suicide and get more and more alarmed by Bunny’s character. In Part Three, the reader is just plainly horrified.

Despite Cave’s fantastic sense of humor, I was ill-at-ease and my uneasiness grew chapter after chapter. The horror of this tale about this sexual predator is partly hidden by the comic thread around the rabbit theme, which is extremely well-done. Bunny loves his name and loves playing with his name and identifies his sex addiction with something embedded in his name. Bunny plays the rabbit card any time: ‘Oh baby, I am the Duracell Bunny!’ and he does a fair imitation of the pink, battery powered, drumming rabbit, up and down the hall’. And now that I’m typing this quote, I see a dildo instead of the Duracell Bunny.

Lots of details in the book or in the way it’s written are linked to the rabbit theme. The rabbit is the symbol of the magazine Playboy. Of course, the expression going at it like rabbits fits him perfectly. The discussions between Bunny and his boss seems to come out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Even Bunny’s son fits in the theme. First, he’s named Bunny Junior. Then he has a chronic eye infection that gives him red rabbit eyes. And when I read “The boy responds with a tilt of the chin but his feet start flip-flopping furiously”, I saw the rabbit Thumper from the Disney movies.

All these ridiculous allusions to rabbits, the ludicrous clothes and ties, the way Bunny goes from one apartment to the other, always hitting on isolated and lonely women make him look like a pitiful loser. You’d almost take pity on him but Nick Cave makes sure that you gradually realize that you are in company of a dangerous sex predator. Bunny’s head is deranged, here he is at McDonald’s:

Bunny sits in McDonald’s with a defibrillated hard-on due to the fact that underneath the cashier’s red and yellow uniform, she hardly has any clothes on.

He’s a sicko, plain and simple. He might have a funny rabbit fetish, he’s still unhealthy and a danger to society. This sums up my ambivalence towards the book. I admired Cave’s craft: the style is extremely funny, he takes his character through a last crazy and desperate run at life, a Thelma & Louise trip in Brighton, UK. But the character of Bunny Munro himself made me terribly ill-at-ease with his incompetence as a father, his sick relationships with women that cover the whole scope of sexual misconducts, sexual harassment up to rape. And through all this, he never thought he was doing anything wrong. A frightening journey in the head of a sexual predator who deep down knows his behavior is wrong but never acknowledges it. Chilling.

Many thanks to Guy for sending this book over the Atlantic. His review is here. There’s another PG13 review on Lisa’s blog here.