Nick Cave once said, “Bukowski is a jerk.” However, with Nick Cave’s new book, “The Death Of Bunny Munro” Cave has found an affinity with said writer’s “Pulp”. As with Bukowski’s swan song, Cave – although without the brilliance of Bukowski’s writing – has gained a sense of profound wisdom to add to his still electrifying energy and urgency. Cave tells the reader that the murderer’s horns are real. The madman is heading towards every one of us, waiting to pounce. It is this atmosphere that prevails throughout the book. A dark, sinister world full of “pensioner killing seagulls” and nose breaking women with black belts.
The fire and brimstone of Cave’s first book, “And The Ass Saw The Angel” is still evident, though slightly less overt and, as a result, more haunting than overpowering. Whilst Brighton Pier burns at the beginning of the book the starlings start to go crazy. The starlings seem to sense the devil on his rampage heading for Bunny himself. Bunny is shown more prophetic glimpses of his future with the recurring image of DUDMAN lorries, of which, “the windscreen wipers are moving at a tremendous rate. But it isn’t even raining.”
However, Bunny cannot become caught in his own mortality. First, he has to look after his son, Bunny Junior, alone after his wife’s suicide. Bunny Junior is the shining glimpse of hope tucked away deep within the cacophony of depravity, death and destruction of Cave’s world. He sees his father as inimitable, constantly in awe and wonder at every movement and word of Bunny’s. Nothing will make Bunny Junior think any different. Not the attempts to seduce teenage girls in McDonald’s, not the dilapidating state of Bunny’s mind and body and not even the inattention shown to Bunny Junior’s eye problem. Junior is Cave’s manifestation of the good in humanity that many are blind to see and unable to appreciate. His own grandmother is unwilling to take him in. Heartbreakingly, Cave laments for a world in which the innocent are punished for the acts of the guilty.
However, the novel isn’t mired inside its own misery. Cave’s unique black humour provides the reader with times to laugh after the tear jerking scenes. Cave’s preoccupation with picturing vaginas, especially Kylie’s or Avril Lavigne’s. His pastiche of product placement, where McDonald’s and Butlins – usually synonymous with cheery family fun – are reduced to scummy, sordid areas where men like Bunny and his father seek women for their fancy. The sharp and tight wordplay of Cave’s lyrics also come to the fore with lines such as, “Labia from Arabia” and “Bunny has a defibrillated hard-on.”
Overall, these ideas seem to have been fermenting in Cave’s mind for the twenty years since his first novel. Instead of rushing, Cave appears to have taken a leaf out of Bukowski’s maxim of “Don’t Try.” Whilst Cave’s writing occasionally drags through inexperience there is no doubting Cave’s incisive portrait on life in the twenty-first century.
James Innis
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