It is proof, if proof was needed, of the dismal anemia of Leona Lewis’s music career, that neither her nether nor her loftier-regions have made it into the pages of Nick Cave’s second novel, The Death of Bunny Munroe. This is a book which speaks openly about Avril Lavigne’s ‘shiny genitalia’ and hails Kylie’s ‘Spinning Around’ as an ‘orgiastic paean to buggery’. Considering Leona’s first and only mega-hit was so conspicuously about menstruation (consult the lyrics if you think me perfidious here), I’m inclined to think Cave has missed a trick.
If he has, it is the only one. Followers of the gaunt man with the long face and the priapic handlebar moustache will find in this book a gluttonous serving of all his tastiest tropes. But here, the trademark gloom, guilt and desire are permeated with a strange tenderness, an unnerving compassion. The night is darkest just before the day, Cave once crooned. By the end of the novel, it’s hard to tell on which side of that terrible threshold we stand.
The eponymous Bunny Munroe is a serial seducer with an alcohol problem and a more or less permanent erection. He sells beauty products door-to-door to lonely, eager women in the Brighton area and finds his raison d’etre in the lace and lipstick conquests he racks up along the way. At home are his wife, Libby, and their young son, Bunny Jr., a budding polymath who idolizes his dad. When Libby hangs herself in a fit of hope-and-helplessness, brought on by the heady mix of Bunny’s crushing lifestyle and her own manic depression, Bunny is left to look after the boy. Perhaps the earliest symptom of Bunny’s own evaporating sanity is the calm and muted decision he then takes: to launch into a booze-fuelled road-trip, full of hand-soap, back-scrub and spermatoza, with Bunny Jr. in the passenger seat.
Cave’s invocation of the road as the slip-stream to disaster could not have arrived at a more appropriate time. We are currently in the middle of a broader cultural regurgitation that has landed tarmac very much back on our plates and under our noses. Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road sullied our cinemas earlier this year, and a screen version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is due out soon. A ‘cultural history of roads’ was published by Joe Moran in June, about the same time as an old Burroughs and Kerouac collaboration bubbled up from somewhere (presumably Interzone).
But if Cave has anything to say about the asphalt, it’s that the potholes, speed limits and tarred myths aren’t really the problem. The drivers are. At one point, Bunny Jr. ‘feels like he’s been “hitting the road” for a million years, but realises with a chilly, drizzly feeling that this is only the third day’. That shivered dripping, gloopy as a runny nose, is what happens when the highway dream comes to present-day Hove. Here, the amphetamine of choice is not Benzedrine but candy floss, and the great spinning lights of Las Vegas are actually the waning filaments of a merry-go-round. Bunny’s saturated freewheeling contains little of the esotericism and poetry that Kerouac wound through his interminable narratives. Where Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty embraced the open road, renouncing destination and conquering distance, Bunny and his son plough about in uncertain, winding spirals, tearing pages from the A to Z in an area-code assault on wanton Brighton booty. The anxiety, of course – and one Cave takes a certain pleasure in winding down to – is what happens when the list ends?
A clue to some of the thematic and stylistic concerns of this gnarled, affecting Via Dolorosa might be found in the music video for his recent single, More News From Nowhere. In the video, Cave and his band are performing on stage in what seems to be an upmarket strip joint. At one point, the camera pans away and we sink into a long crimson bar with mahogany stools and a dapper, tuxedoed bartender. A lone figure sits with his drink, tall and imposing, sombrely absorbed in a magazine crossword. It’s Will Self, an old mate of Cave’s and a deliriously underappreciated author in his own right. More people have read his Forewords than his fiction – Self penned the introduction to Cave’s own Complete Lyrics in 2007.
In what is perhaps Self’s finest novel, How The Dead Live, a rancorous lady called Lily Bloom dies an appalling death from cancer. Lily is surprised to find that, far from arriving in Heaven or Hell (or simply not arriving at all), she is instead relocated to Crouch End. Woven into this fascinating narrative is the uneasy question of familial connection to the passed, and the past. Once dead, is it really wise to involve yourself in the business of the sentient? What do you do when you bump into your daughter on Woodside Avenue, and she asks why you’re not dead after all?
Cave’s story is, in no small part, that of a child trying to come to terms with the premature demise of his mother. Bunny Jr. sees and smells her everywhere. The images and apparitions are, for him, deeply comforting. But the boy is too perspicacious, too aware of his father’s volatility, to trouble him with the details of his heartache. Unsurprisingly, for Bunny himself, similar visions are guilt-ridden hauntings, spectral horrors that jump-start psychotic episodes of demented violence. Libby’s gored countenance stares out through a car window. Her purple, swollen head swivels and creaks about his consciousness. The self-proclaimed Cocksman is slowly sent mad.
Of course, it is the relationship (or absence of such) between father and son that is the true kernel of this bitter love song. For this very reason, it warrants omission in this review – the reader must graft his own experience onto the page. Just as Bunny is doomed to die, it seems our relationships with our fathers are also, somehow, predestined. There’s something reckless and haphazard about them, something of the drunk at the wheel. Joyous and tender, cursed and sorrowful, turbulence is part of the ride. This, above all, is what Nick Cave knows. His book spells out the harrowed, fractured angst of this event.
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