Would you wait 277 pages to read about the end of one of the most reprehensible characters encountered in contemporary literature? The book's title and its opening lines set up the demise of Bunny Munro, and so the only tension is whether it refers to grandfather, father, or son: all three share the same name. There is much depravity to go around, as the middle-aged Bunny Munro sells beauty products door-to-door and preoccupies himself in taking sexual advantage of his customers, a practice that drives Libby, his long-suffering wife, to despair. If Bunny Senior was not a lothario, he was certainly as bad a role model.
In some ways, the most interesting sequences in Nick Cave's new novel follow Bunny from assignation to assignation, as the reader marvels at the depths of depravity. The author has fun, too: how much time can one spend describing Bunny gleefully lighting cigarettes? But as Bunny has to take more responsibility for his young son, he must modify his behavior, grudgingly. Happily, this is not a simple bad-boy-makes-good story. The "new" Bunny has threatened his physical well-being, and that -- as much as anything -- changes Bunny's ways. Still, the ladies man does not go quietly, and his shambolic decline almost matches the energy of the book's first chapters.
Cave does a nice job drawing the sensitive, thoughtful Bunny Junior, a young man who thrives in spite of his surroundings. And while I would have liked a little more detail in the Brighton surroundings, it was great to read something set in one of my favorite British locales. And The Ass Saw The Angel, Nick Cave's first novel, was written in the baroque style of late Faulkner or early Cormac McCarthy, but The Death of Bunny Munro is more approachable, if no less disturbing. It is obvious that the creativity that feeds his best work with the Bad Seeds runs just as dark through his prose.
Not at all recommended for those sensibilities easily offended.
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