First Post - The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave

So Nick Cave has written a new novel, his first since his debut novel And The Ass Saw The Angel came out twenty years ago (really, twenty years ago? Good Christ).

You would think, that given the fact it has been soooo long, and the fact it’s Nick Cave, that the sky would open up and the ground would a-rumble and the mountains fall down to the ground, a flock of black starlings swooping down to peck out your eyes and so on, and so on…. But it’s really not that great.

I love Nick Cave – in my mind he is Australia’s late-comer Bob Dylan – but this novel is really disappointing.

The main character is an amoral nymphomaniac, a hopeless single father and a wonderfully deceitful (and skilled) salesman. The fact there is little to like about Bunny Munro would not put me off the novel alone, however Cave seems to feel such affinity for Bunny that he ejaculates Bunny’s every sex-addled neurotic thought, page after page, into the novel.

Initially, this helps you to feel all the more repulsed by Bunny, and get a feeling for the character, while readily enjoying the reactions of those around him. Which is fine at the beginning of the book, but by about one hundred pages in you begin to tire of the constant tangents on the size, shape and texture of Avril Lavigne’s vagina (yes, you read right), and just want the actual story progress.

The tragic voice of Bunny Junior, having just lost his mother, and slowly realising just what kind of man his father is (at age nine) could have appeared more often, and the just-on-the-boundaries Horned Killer could been better exploited if handled in a more overt Cave-esque manner.

Not horrible, not great. Definitely not worthy of Cave’s own name…

2/5

Side note: The top images are the three versions of the novel's cover. Apparently US retailers wouldn't carry the more overt Australian cover (far right), and instead went with the image of an actual Bunny.... yes, US consumers are apparently that easily startled.