Music Blogs

Leyla Sanai gets to grips with the Australian singer's second novel -the long-awaited follow-up to 1989's And the Ass Saw the Angel. She's highly impressed.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

Nick Cave was never going to settle for "just" being a rock star. Right back from when I was first aware of him, in the early '80s, when he was screaming out discordant songs of violence and passion with the Birthday Party, he had an idiosyncratic aura of manic intensity about him. Plenty of people were enmeshed in the raw power of punk, but Cave had the look of a crazed Gothic preacher-man about him, all chiselled cheekbones, stringy, flailing limbs, glazed eyes and howling outrage.

Since then, Cave has continued to create rousing, moving music, sometimes wild,  sometimes tender, always with a streak of darkness about it. He continues to work with the Bad Seeds and founded Grinderman in 2006. His latest releases include the second album with Grinderman, a compilation of film scores that Cave wrote with bandmate Warren Ellis called White Lunar, and the first of a collection of digitally remastered Nick Cave and Bad Seeds albums.

Cave has also done a bit of acting here and there, sometimes combining the acting with his music, sometimes singing other people's songs (as in the 2005 homage to Leonard Cohen), and sometimes providing soundtracks to other people's movies (eg Wim Wenders' Wings Of Desire in 1987).

Cave's first novel, And The Ass Saw The Devil, was published 20 years ago. This was by no means his first publication--he'd previously published King Ink in 1988, a book of lyrics and other work including a collaboration with one-time US queen of underground new wave Lydia Lunch. In 1997 he published King Ink ll, which consisted of more lyrics, poems and a transcript of an essay, "The Flesh Made Word,"  discussing his Christianity. Cave was brought up an Anglican, and penned the foreword for Canongate's Gospel According To Mark in 1998. So the persona of a drink-drenched hellfire and brimstone preacher is not altogether a fictional guise.

Cave has also written scripts and screenplays, including the screenplay for The Proposition, set in the outback of his country of origin Australia, and directed by his friend John Hillcoat, who also directed a film in which Cave appeared in 1989, and who is directing the film of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, for which Cave is writing the soundtrack. Cave also worked on a script for a follow-up to The Gladiator at the urging of Russell Crowe, but the film was never made. The Death Of Bunny Munro also started life as a screenplay--Hillcoat had asked Cave to write a screenplay about a travelling salesman, and Cave produced the finished work in three weeks. Cave turned it into a novel because the film was thought to be too costly to make.

I never read  Cave's debut novel And The Ass Saw The Devil, but from what I've heard, some of its themes recur in The Death Of Bunny Munro: the fear of death, the feeling of death close by, an alcoholic parent.

The main character in The Death Of Bunny Munro is the eponymous Bunny, a door-to-door salesman with what would, in today's medicalized culture, be termed an "addiction" to sex. Bunny is rampant. Every woman he sees is visualised automatically by his brain as a potentially receptive set of genitals with a person (inconveniently) attached. His misogynistic view of women is often imaginative--he sees one voluptuous woman as a mass of "custard-injected profiteroles" or a "wet bag of overripe peaches." The only woman he has feelings for is his wife, Libby, but being faithful to her doesn't even enter his head. She--unsurprisingly--suffers from severe depression as a result of his womanizing. They have a prodigiously smart nine-year-old son, Bunny Junior.

Bunny Senior's existence seems to consist of visiting female clients on the pretext of selling them beauty products, and seducing them. If his travelling job involves staying in seedy hotels, so much the better, as they provide more potential for casual sex. He has a degree of delusion about his attractiveness ("there's a pull...a magnetic drag...a mischievous arch to his eyebrows and the little hymen-popping dimples in his cheeks when he laughs"), but his score rate is still pretty impressive. Then again, even 0.01% of Every Woman You Meet amounts to a lot of shagging.

When tragedy strikes early on in the book with the unexpected death of Libby, Bunny Senior is left with Bunny Junior to look after. Bunny Jr clearly adores his father and, despite the roles of parent and nurtured being reversed, Bunny Jr loves being with his dad. The story follows the two during the days after the trauma, when Bunny Sr drags his son around with him while he visits clients. There is an impending sense of doom, both in Bunny Sr's head and in the novel itself, as Bunny Sr continues to live hedonistically for the present, drowning himself in liquor and licentiousness.

I knew Cave was a highly talented songwriter, but I had no idea that that gift would translate into straight fiction. The Death Of Bunny Munro is a book of poetic intensity with resonant, haunting prose. Cave frequently creates visually striking, dreamy images:

".. the boy watches the sun as it falls beyond the horizon and casts the sea in yellow gold, then pink gold, and then an ethereal, sorrowing blue."

He often seems to grasp exactly the right words to use, even when they are used in an unusual context:

"a faraway voice that rises up from the soft curds of sleep."

This luminous language is particularly moving when it applies to Bunny Junior, who is grieving for his mother:

"He will think that even though his mother would come into his room and hold him and stroke his forehead and cry her eyes out, her hand was still the softest, sweetest, warmest thing he had ever felt, and he will look up and see a flock of starlings trace the angles of her face in the sky."

Cave also conveys with remarkable sensitivity the confusion the boy feels at his father's behavior, which is mixed in with his unflinching loyalty to him:

"The boy smiles at Bunny, but the smile is the kind of smile that looks like it has fallen off the child's face, shattered on the ground and then been glued back together at random--it's a zigzag smile, a see-saw smile, a wonky little broken smile."

More often, though, Cave employs this sharp-witted talent with words to humorous effect. Sometimes this is to convey Bunny Senior's  nerve-strung state of mind:  "...something has changed in his wife's voice, the soft cellos have gone and a high rasping violin has been added, played by an escaped ape or something," or: "He draws (his eyes) open extravagantly and vulcanized daylight and the screaming of birds deranges the room," or: "Somewhere in the outer reaches of his consciousness he becomes aware of a manic twittering sound, a tinnitus of enraged protest, almost electronic in its horror..."

At other times, the use of deliciously apt vocabulary is simply to jazz up descriptions of the ordinary: "She has...a conga-line of raw acne across her forehead...," or "Graeme is a tall man with a huge, round, aggressive head and a seriously sunburned face--a human stop sign".

Some of Cave's writing reads like contemporary urban poetry, so astute is its grasp of unspoken threat, such as this description of "hoodies":

"The young men suck on their cigarettes, jets of nostril smoke issuing from the obscurity of their hoods. No one says anything but there is a general ratcheting-up of the potential for violence as the youths realign their bodies inside their giant, comic-book clothes. The youth in the middle propels a bead of spittle into the air and it lands at Bunny's feet."

Although related in the third person, using the reader-involving present tense, the narrator has insight into Bunny Senior's point of view. Occasionally this switches momentarily to Bunny Jr's perceptions, and the reader is struck by how brave and mature this bereaved child is. The boy's faith in his father holds until the end and he is given strength by imagined conversations with his mother's ghost.

The sex is frequent and frantic but not gratuitous. Depictions of Bunny Senior are so humiliating as to be hilarious: "his c**k feels and looks like something that has been involved in a terrible accident--a cartoon hotdog, maybe, that has made an unsuccessful attempt to cross a busy road."

Although Bunny Senior is a real unreconstructed, knuckle-dragging caveman, he doesn't come across as evil like other notorious literary predators such as Bret Easton Ellis's Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. He just seems sad, hovering near the edge of life and about to take a fatal tumble. As the story goes on, his acts become more depraved, and the sense of the end approaching that he has felt in flashes seems to inure him to any emotion whatsoever.

It's easy to see that this novel started out as a screenplay, so cinematic are some of its scenes. Imagine this excerpt transposed onto the big screen:

"After a while Bunny stands up and slaps the dust from his trousers, then moves down the darkened hall as if he is walking into a great wind and, in time, he arrives at a black door. The piercing sonic oscillation is louder here and Bunny puts his hands over his ears and peers closely at a large poster...he feels new tears scald his cheeks and he reaches out and traces, with his finger, the tender contours of her infinitely beautiful face, as if by doing so he could bring her miraculously to life."

This is a sometimes stunning, always compelling novel of a lost soul ploughing intractably towards destruction, and of the devastation wrought by such people on those close to them. I could often imagine Cave's voice reading the text, especially since there are aspects that seem to fit closely with his verbal style, such as the frequent verbal tic of adding "or something" unnecessarily at the end of a sentence, which occurs around 30 times. I believe there is an audio version of the book due out, which Cave diehards may want to wait for. For all others, I'd advise buying this book now. It's strange and disturbing, but it is full of the raw power of Cave's musical endeavours.