The couple rise from the table and the man moves closer to Bunny, like a skeletal animal on its hind legs, patting the breadcrumbs off the front of his trousers.
‘Oh, man, you’re a trip,’ he says, in the manner of a wolf. ‘You really fucking are.’
‘I know,’ says Bunny.
‘You’re out of this fucking world,’ says the man.
Bunny winks at the woman and says, ‘You look good,’ and means it.
The couple exit the dining room leaving a sickly ghostage of Chanel No. 5 that compounds Bunny’s hangover and makes him wince and bare his teeth and return to the newspaper.
He licks an index finger, flips a page and sees a full-page CCTV grab of the guy with the body paint, the plastic devil’s horns and the trident.
‘HORNY AND ON THE LOOSE’, says the headline. Bunny tries to read the article but the words just don’t want to do what they were invented to do and keep breaking formation, reordering themselves, scrambling, decodifying, whatever, generally fucking around, and Bunny gives up and feels a mushroom cloud of acid explode in his stomach and blow up his throat. He shudders and wretches.
Bunny looks up and becomes aware of a waitress standing over him holding in front of her a full English breakfast. Cheeks, chin, breasts, stomach and buttocks – she looks like she has been designed solely with a compass – a series of soft, fleshy circles, in the middle of which hover two large, round, colourless eyes. She wears a purple gingham uniform, a size too small, with white collar and cuffs, her hair raked back in a ponytail and a nametag that says ‘River’. As Bunny disimagines her clothes he thinks for a fraction of a second of a pile of custard-injected profiteroles, then a wet bag of overripe peaches, but settles on the mental image of her vagina, with its hair and its hole. He says, closing the newspaper with a careful, disbelieving shaking of the head, ‘This world, I tell you, it gets weirder every day.’
Nick Cave can write, and not just songs. Haven’t read And the Ass Saw the Angel, but with The Death of Bunny Munro
5/5 stars
The Death of Bunny Munro is hard to classify. Gothic romance, magical realism, long-form religious parable – none of these remotely suffices. It’s set in the modern day and there are supernatural elements, but it ain’t urban (or even suburban) fantasy. One could kinda, superficially compare it to certain works by Flannery O’Connor, Graham Greene or Henry Miller, but I won’t. Nick Cave’s novel is truly unique.
The story bounces along in the present tense with a fire and cumstain brimstone lyricism as acerbic and weirdly moving as the best of Cave’s song lyrics. There is a musicianly attention to the sound and rhythm of words, the texture of both inner and outer environments, the flow of events and emotions. Even when Cave is describing the most brutal and banal of subjects, The Death of Bunny Munro is a genuine joy to read.
Our doomed hero, the by turns charming, casually obnoxious, pathetic and downright monstrous Bunny Munro, is big into creative visualization: disembodied celebrity vaginas, that kind of thing. But increasingly, helplessly, Bunny finds himself seeing things he’d rather not, among them the shade of his late wife; and through a series of encounters with various women around Brighton (whom he attempts to both seduce and induce to buy beauty products) Bunny’s perception of himself in/projection of himself onto the world and others’ perceptions of/projections onto him battle to - well, you know. Along for the ride is Bunny’s preadolescent son, Bunny Jr., who also visualizes and projects constantly, not only things he reads about in his cherished encyclopedia (a gift from his mother he’s in the process of memorizing) but his (initially, anyway) larger-than-life idea of his father. As his father grows increasingly delusional, Bunny Jr.’s vision sharpens (he too is vexed by sporadic visitations from Mrs. Munro, but for different reasons than his father) and we eventually see as much through Bunny Jr.’s encrusted eyes (he has blepharitis, but his dad has more urgent concerns than procuring repeatedly requested eyedrops) as through Bunny’s. The tension thereby generated kept my nerves as jangled, despite knowing the outcome, as any page-turning pulp thriller.
Cave never reveals where Bunny Munro goes when he dies, but I will: to join the pantheon of reality-bending rabbits from Carroll’s to the púca of Harvey and Donnie Darko to the domesticated demons of Inland Empire. With Cave’s creation on the loose among them, those bunnies are going to have their paws full.
Happy reading and cuídate.