It’s easy to mock celebrity novelists – the assumption being that were it not for their fame, their novel would never have been published. To every rule there is an exception, and in this case, that exception is a 50-something year old Australian, Nick Cave. Cave has firmly established himself as musician and screenwriter and his second work of fiction The Death Of Bunny Munro firmly places him a novelist of some considerable talent too. The eponymous anti-hero of the book, Bunny Munro, is a cocaine-fuelled, cosmetics salesman with a nine-year-old son, a dying father and a wife, who doesn’t make it very far into the story at all.

In addition to this, there’s a psychopath on the loose, labelled by the tabloids ‘The Horned Killer’, who’s red painted body is seen rampaging across shopping centres across the land, murdering women with a pitchfork and getting closer and closer to Bunny’s Brighton home.

Cave’s portrayal of Munro as a dull man with an insatiable appetite for sex is well crafted and full with as much to stop us in our tracks as to make us laugh out loud. When discussing whether or not he’s a leg man or a breast man, Munro telling says he’s a vagina man, with no interest in either – just the physical act itself.

That said, Munro isn’t unlikable, and Cave’s telling of how Bunny and his son become increasingly unravelled following the death of Bunny’s wife, leads us to have far more sympathy for him that perhaps we’d like to admit, particularly given some of the ‘desires’ he has for Kylie Minogue and Avril Lavigne.

Cave’s never been afraid to upset and offend, and this novel doesn’t disappoint, although it does leave you with the impression that Cave is an extremely accomplished writer with a lot more dark ideas to share with us in the future.

I was analogue enough to read this novel in a physical format, and it is worth mentioning that Canongate has released the book in other formats including as an audiobook read by Cave, and with a soundtrack composed by himself and Warren Ellis.

Reviewed by Scott Morris

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