Bjorn
02-Dec-2009, 13:04
"Are you for real?" women ask Bunny Munro in open-mouthed shock. (Well, not all of them.) "Do guys like you still exist? Shouldn't you be in a museum somewhere, with a sign around your neck saying PREHISTORIC FOSSIL?"
Bunny himself, of course, doesn't really get why they react like that. (Well, some of them.) After all, what has he ever done wrong? No misogynist he; he loves pussy. ...Women, I mean. Bunny Munro loves women. In fact, it is... I mean they are pretty much what his entire life revolves around. As one of the most successful travelling salesmen of a cosmetics company, he rides from town to town in his faithful Fiat, seduces farmer's daughters... uh, bored suburban housewives into buying his various, ahem, creams, then rides home to his faithful if boring wife (jerking off a couple of times on the way) and spends his nights fantasizing about Avril Lavigne and Kylie Minogue and the neighbour's 14-year-old and, well, anything with a... he loves women. (Cave apologizes to Lavigne and Minogue in the afterword, and for good reason.) That's his entire existence: want pussy, have pussy, joke about pussy, dream about pussy, and occasionally pat his young son on the head and make him want to be like him. The world is, ahem, his oyster.
And then one day it falls apart. His wife kills herself rather than live with him, and suddenly Bunny is alone with a young kid, a growing gut, and a life built around... well, a hole, I suppose. So after first having sex with a colleague's girlfriend (he has no actual friends to speak of) at his wife's wake, he takes Bunny Jr out of school to "teach him the ropes", and together the two of them set out on a The Road-style odyssey (it's hardly a coincidence that he and John Hillcoat have been collaborating on the film version) through a Britain of council flats, 20-year-old mothers of three, and drugged-out teenagers who look like pop stars (or possibly the other way around). Bunny tries to do his job, sell his product to increasingly apprehensive women, while the certainty that something is going to end very very soon is slowly causing him to lose his, ahem, marbles. He keeps seeing news reports of a man dressed as the devil who's working himself down through England on a collision course with Bunny, beating women to death. Meanwhile, poor motherless Bunny Jr (there's three Bunny Munros in this - grandfather, father, son) is trying to teach himself about the world from an old encyclopedia that can only offer (dubious) facts.
Cave's second novel is savage, both in the the way his protagonist acts and in the treatment Cave gives him, and also very funny; it's as if he can't quite make up his mind if Bunny deserves pity for what the world has made him or a swift kick in the balls for what he does to the world, and decides to do both. Cave was always one of rock's more ambitious songwriters, with an approach that echoes Milton, Updike or Straub as often as it does Hooker, Reed or Dylan, and in Bunny Munro he proves himself a more than capable prose writer as well. It's funny how his writing has developed since the 80s; where his Faulkner-on-heroin debut And The Ass Saw The Angel felt like a novelization of a Nick Cave song (specifically, a mash-up of "Swampland" and "Tupelo"), many of his recent songs have felt more like condensed novels made to rhyme. And Bunny Munro has the same restless, frantic, impotently furious feel of many of his best latter-day lyrics, except here he gets to spread out and explore every, ahem, crevice of what it means. Bunny tumbles head-first (you know which one) through life in a rhythmic, pounding, Humbert/Rabbit Angstrom/John Self-like haze of images and ideas about himself and those who exist for his pleasure, unsure of which bits are jokes and which ones are just very macabre tragedies, only that they're all increasingly at his expense. Especially Cave's dialogue is an absolute joy to read, if by "joy" you mean "funny, but awkward and authentic enough to make your teeth hurt."
Sure, in the long run his strength is more in how the story is told, and like his other recent full-length effort (the script for The Proposition), his plot and his points end up a little too predictable; not enough to ruin the book, but just enough that you know what's around the bend before he gets there. He kicks in what should be open doors, but he does it with style. You might argue that he's being either hypocritical or just a little too honest, considering the amount of songs he's written about stalking, beating or killing women, but of course Cave realised that that aspect of his writing was turning into self-parody over 10 years ago and mostly (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuDP7c3Zd8I) ditched that persona following Murder Ballads. When he revisits it now, as if he wants to finally deconstruct and bury the idea of the poor, set-upon middle-aged male novel protagonist trying to understand why women won't fuck... I mean love him, it's often about as subtle as - to quote a phrase (http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/66407/) - "a fucking really big brick." Bunny, the killer (or at least rapist) rabbit who sells women an idea of wanting to be like he wants them to be, makes them pay through the nose for it, and passes it on to the next generation without a second's thought. The real and more subtle tragedy is in the world we see around Bunny - the men who laugh at his jokes, the women who gladly play his game for lack of anything better in their life, poor Bunny Jr idolizing his father for lack of anything else. Cave walks - or rather, runs ranting back and forth - along a thin line between social commentary and outrageous satire, and keeps it up (sorry) more than he falls off. Bunny Munro dies and lives forever; a pitiful, hilariously inept predator caveman, whose only function is to swim and eat and make little sharks, and lacks even the language to wonder why he shouldn't be allowed to.
Is he for real?
***00 (****0 to Cave fans)
Bunny himself, of course, doesn't really get why they react like that. (Well, some of them.) After all, what has he ever done wrong? No misogynist he; he loves pussy. ...Women, I mean. Bunny Munro loves women. In fact, it is... I mean they are pretty much what his entire life revolves around. As one of the most successful travelling salesmen of a cosmetics company, he rides from town to town in his faithful Fiat, seduces farmer's daughters... uh, bored suburban housewives into buying his various, ahem, creams, then rides home to his faithful if boring wife (jerking off a couple of times on the way) and spends his nights fantasizing about Avril Lavigne and Kylie Minogue and the neighbour's 14-year-old and, well, anything with a... he loves women. (Cave apologizes to Lavigne and Minogue in the afterword, and for good reason.) That's his entire existence: want pussy, have pussy, joke about pussy, dream about pussy, and occasionally pat his young son on the head and make him want to be like him. The world is, ahem, his oyster.
And then one day it falls apart. His wife kills herself rather than live with him, and suddenly Bunny is alone with a young kid, a growing gut, and a life built around... well, a hole, I suppose. So after first having sex with a colleague's girlfriend (he has no actual friends to speak of) at his wife's wake, he takes Bunny Jr out of school to "teach him the ropes", and together the two of them set out on a The Road-style odyssey (it's hardly a coincidence that he and John Hillcoat have been collaborating on the film version) through a Britain of council flats, 20-year-old mothers of three, and drugged-out teenagers who look like pop stars (or possibly the other way around). Bunny tries to do his job, sell his product to increasingly apprehensive women, while the certainty that something is going to end very very soon is slowly causing him to lose his, ahem, marbles. He keeps seeing news reports of a man dressed as the devil who's working himself down through England on a collision course with Bunny, beating women to death. Meanwhile, poor motherless Bunny Jr (there's three Bunny Munros in this - grandfather, father, son) is trying to teach himself about the world from an old encyclopedia that can only offer (dubious) facts.
Cave's second novel is savage, both in the the way his protagonist acts and in the treatment Cave gives him, and also very funny; it's as if he can't quite make up his mind if Bunny deserves pity for what the world has made him or a swift kick in the balls for what he does to the world, and decides to do both. Cave was always one of rock's more ambitious songwriters, with an approach that echoes Milton, Updike or Straub as often as it does Hooker, Reed or Dylan, and in Bunny Munro he proves himself a more than capable prose writer as well. It's funny how his writing has developed since the 80s; where his Faulkner-on-heroin debut And The Ass Saw The Angel felt like a novelization of a Nick Cave song (specifically, a mash-up of "Swampland" and "Tupelo"), many of his recent songs have felt more like condensed novels made to rhyme. And Bunny Munro has the same restless, frantic, impotently furious feel of many of his best latter-day lyrics, except here he gets to spread out and explore every, ahem, crevice of what it means. Bunny tumbles head-first (you know which one) through life in a rhythmic, pounding, Humbert/Rabbit Angstrom/John Self-like haze of images and ideas about himself and those who exist for his pleasure, unsure of which bits are jokes and which ones are just very macabre tragedies, only that they're all increasingly at his expense. Especially Cave's dialogue is an absolute joy to read, if by "joy" you mean "funny, but awkward and authentic enough to make your teeth hurt."
Sure, in the long run his strength is more in how the story is told, and like his other recent full-length effort (the script for The Proposition), his plot and his points end up a little too predictable; not enough to ruin the book, but just enough that you know what's around the bend before he gets there. He kicks in what should be open doors, but he does it with style. You might argue that he's being either hypocritical or just a little too honest, considering the amount of songs he's written about stalking, beating or killing women, but of course Cave realised that that aspect of his writing was turning into self-parody over 10 years ago and mostly (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuDP7c3Zd8I) ditched that persona following Murder Ballads. When he revisits it now, as if he wants to finally deconstruct and bury the idea of the poor, set-upon middle-aged male novel protagonist trying to understand why women won't fuck... I mean love him, it's often about as subtle as - to quote a phrase (http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/66407/) - "a fucking really big brick." Bunny, the killer (or at least rapist) rabbit who sells women an idea of wanting to be like he wants them to be, makes them pay through the nose for it, and passes it on to the next generation without a second's thought. The real and more subtle tragedy is in the world we see around Bunny - the men who laugh at his jokes, the women who gladly play his game for lack of anything better in their life, poor Bunny Jr idolizing his father for lack of anything else. Cave walks - or rather, runs ranting back and forth - along a thin line between social commentary and outrageous satire, and keeps it up (sorry) more than he falls off. Bunny Munro dies and lives forever; a pitiful, hilariously inept predator caveman, whose only function is to swim and eat and make little sharks, and lacks even the language to wonder why he shouldn't be allowed to.
Is he for real?
***00 (****0 to Cave fans)