Listening to Nick Cave read ‘The Death of Bunny Munro’
November 13, 2009 at 3:39 pm by Wyatt Williams in Books
Let’s say you’re a Nick Cave fan. Maybe not even a “fan,” but someone who owns and likes a couple of his records. You might not listen to him much anymore. If someone asked you why you like him, you might talk about that inimitable Australian voice of his. Or you might talk about his songwriting (which has bordered on story writing for most of his career) and the enduring cast of characters he has born – murderers and witnesses and bystanders to the scenes.
Or, if you’re the story-telling type, you would talk about the first time you really listened to a Nick Cave album. It was Tender Prey and you were single at the time, so no one was around to tell you to turn it down. You pulled a bottle of Bushmills out of the cabinet and listened to it over and over again, turning up the volume a little each time until you realized that Nick Cave just sounded best at 10, blaring so loud that your speakers were in a vague sort of danger. You don’t remember how many times you listened to the album that night, but you can recall how the repetition of songs like “The Mercy Seat” were every bit as intoxicating as the Bushmills. You remember waking up the next day with a splitting headache and the needle skipping at the end of the record.
Maybe that didn’t happen to you, but that’s exactly how I remember it. When Nick Cave’s second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, came out earlier this year, I was interested but only vaguely. Have you ever tried to read Bob Dylan’s novel Tarantula? It doesn’t bode well for the musician to novelist crossover. Using that reference as judgment, I didn’t pick up the book and still haven’t.
But I did listen to the audiobook. The unabridged, eight hour long book-on-CD is a recording of Cave reading along with a soundtrack performed by him and Warren Ellis.
As I understand it, the main markets for an audiobook are long-haul truckers and people who, for one reason or another, can’t see the words on the page. They’re usually kept in some dusty ghetto of the bookstore and overshadowed by the giant packages of “How To Speak” foreign language programs. Owing perhaps to the fact that I’ve never driven an eighteen-wheeler or been unable to see, I’ve listened to very few in my life. My mother borrowed Michael Crichton books-on-tape from the library for a long family vacations and a friend pushed me to listen to David Sedaris read from Holidays on Ice. That’s about it.
To tell the truth, I didn’t really know what to do with The Death of Bunny Munro audiobook once I had it. Should I go drive somewhere to listen to it? Did I need to upload the discs onto my iPod? The odd, folded package of discs sat on my coffee table for awhile until I just dropped one in the stereo and pressed play, like I was listening to a Bad Seeds CD.
Before long, I found myself turning up the volume and changing disc after disc. Though Cave does not break into song, his voice is every bit as engaging, campy, and grim while telling the story of Bunny Munro, traveling hand creme salesman. The soundtrack is not unlike the work Cave and Ellis did for The Assassination of Jesse James, focused on a few central melodies and occasionally ramping up the melodramatic tension with droning electric guitars.
Bunny Munro is a man both disgusted with violence and complicitly perpetrating it. His depressed wife kills herself after a phone call Bunny makes from a hotel room, wasted and in bed with a prostitute. She leaves Bunny to tend to Bunny Jr., a young boy who looks up to his father with an unfortunate sense of awe and respect. As the title indicates, this path is leading Bunny to an inevitable reckoning.
The vagina, in Bunny’s eyes, is a perfect metaphor for almost anything in the world. The rest of a woman’s life can open up to her like a vagina. A beautiful summer day is warm and waiting like, well, you get the point. Lust is an overwhelming force in Bunny’s life, compulsively driving him like the urges of an opiate addict, and sexual organs get quite a deal of descriptive attention. His “considerable member” gets so much ungentle attention that it is compared to a cartoon hot dog that has failed miserably in trying to cross a road.
On the page, Bunny Munro would probably seem overwritten, but Cave has a vocalist’s ability to tweak an overstuffed line with careful delivery. Even phrases like “considerable member” (precious and annoying on a page) are contextually better in Cave’s voice. His dramatic emphasis can possess intensity and subtle irony in the same tone. Honestly, a grocery list would sound pretty good read aloud by this guy.
The Death of Bunny Munro isn’t a mere grocery list, but it isn’t really literature either. It’s gothic melodrama told in the high-biblical-camp mode that Cave has been working in for years. I devoured almost all 8 hours of this thing in one night because it attempts the addictive, repetitive quality of Cave’s vision. As just a book, it’s a gratuitous work, lingering in one sexual encounter after another in examination of a relatively flat moral dilemma. As read by Cave, it is vivid and engaging, an eight-hour detour into the exageratedly grim and uncomfortably funny world that exists on albums like Tender Prey. It’s probably the best eight-hour-long album he’ll ever write.
The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave. Macmillan Audio. $34.99. 7 CDs and a bonus DVD
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