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The Death of Bunny Munro

Author: Nick Cave
Publisher: Faber and Faber
$25.00 Cloth (278 p.)
ISBN: 9780865479104
B&T        MAJORS       YBP


Reviewed by Sarah Yasin, e-Content Bibliographer

The Death of Bunny Munro brims with crisp, succinct writing. Nick Cave has an interesting and entertaining literary style: he turns nouns into verbs in ways that have never been attempted before. We see this style on page 6: “He lurches, stumbles and Tarzans the faded chintz curtains.”

He employs a different kind of narrative voice that uses the third-person omniscient point of view. This narrative voice drops the F bomb in a masculine and “I don’t care” manner. The book is Rock & Roll in many ways, mainly because it rocks the reader’s expectations of having a story narrated by a just-the-facts kind of voice.

Bunny Munro is a hypersexual door-to-door cosmetics salesman who has just discovered the corpse of his suicidal wife at his flat in Portslade. Because he is grieving, he brings his 9 year old son with him on the road as he descends into insanity, neglect for his boy, and avoidance of apparitions of his late wife:

“Bunny . . . feels all the psychic strings that bind him to the rational earth snapping like rubber bands in his skull . . .”

The book’s great moment of irony and discordance is during Bunny’s purgatorial vision when everything which has been so chaotic is suddenly neatly packaged, as if sanity were the ultimate insanity.

Nick Cave employs a lyric and minimalist wording style while the story is excessive in its debauchery. There are no wasted words here – only a wasted protagonist. The narrative voice uses clichés, which normally is a literary sin, but it works for this book because the voice becomes a fixture of the story in its own way. There are many unexplained actions in the book, which I think is a new trend in literature. This style goes so far beyond the realm of predictability that it borders on being unsatisfying because of its lack of explanations. But isn’t life, after all, unsatisfying? The best we can do is laugh about it, and this book certainly succeeds in producing audible laughter.

I imagine the book is better with each new read-through, the first read being one to get used to the shock of such a different kind of book. The violence and grime in the book are reminiscent of the BBC’s The Young Ones, or a cartoon from the 1940’s which is full of violence and no lasting consequences for actions. As a reader, I can sense the film of filth that covers every piece of clothing in every scene, but I am too engrossed by the plot not to continue reading on.

Usually the opening sentence of a book is what has the greatest impact on a reader, but in the case of The Death of Bunny Munro, it’s the final sentence that hits the reader in the gut with a legion of meaning, irony, sadness, hope, and contains within it a novel unto itself. With this conclusion, the 1940’s cartoon is made sublime.