I simultaneously loved and hated this book. Bunny Munro is an outrageous sex addicted door to door salesman, on a booze fueled downward spiral following the death of his wife (all the while dragging his 9 year old son, Bunny Junior, down with him).

At points the book has a dirty, sad realism and at other points it is manic and fantastical, reminding me of Hunter S Thompson. It tries to do a lot, examining grief, addiction, the father son relationship, being an unprepared and unwilling parent. Most of this it does well, but this relatively short book could be trimmer in places (e.g. a whole plot line about a horned serial killer that kind of goes nowhere). The crudeness of the book I'm fine with, and seems appropriate for the character, but at points Bunny really does cross some lines that make him hard to like or relate to.

Did I enjoy it? Absolutely! Would I read it again? Probably not?

Carré. Avril Lavigne. Birds' nests in pier burning. Clammed shut.

This is an incredibly dark, raw, horrifying novel that I ended up reading compulsively in two sittings. A lyrical piece of prose that is unafraid to portray humanity at its most vile, Cave somehow captures the vulnerability of even the most terrible of antiheroes: Bunny Munro, so that you are left feeling horrifying, amused and moved by his morality tale and by the flawed, heartbreaking relationship between father and son.

Bunny Munro is, in his opinion, a skilled womaniser and a brilliant salesman with a wife and child at home. Everything is perpetually perfect in Bunny's life until his wife, Libby, commits suicide and he is left to care for their nine year old sensitive and bright son: Bunny Jr. Slowly, his life unravels and, with it, the delusions that he has used to bolster his existence for so long.

Spoiler

Even from the beginning, it is clear that there are many aspects of Bunny's life that are rather bleak, from his shitty Punto to his council house apartment, and yet Cave plays the audience so well in slowly revealing the true depths of how well Bunny can lie to himself. While he initially comes across as a gross, perverted Casanova, all too familiar from the earlier noughties, the novel slowly unpicks and unravels his psyche until even his 'hymen popping dimples' are exposed as a facade for a man who commits horrific date-rapes and clearly traumatises, assaults and degrades all of the women in his life. Peppering in details that slowly reveal the true depravity of his character, including how many ASBOs has has accumulated, the audience are eventually forced to witness him raping a girl who is high and unconscious. His dogged need to avoid this truth, and the slow cracking of his psyche that leads to it spilling out, is played out carefully and his catchphrases/sales banter, which are repeated with greater and greater frenzied panic, show how carefully constructed his life was and how unsustainable that has become as the great weight of his crimes catch up with him. Indeed, even his great mea culpa moment at the end of the book is introduced as a fantasy by his son before it even begins. Bunny is once again comforting himself, seeking absolution for himself, but showing no great understanding of the consequences of his actions.

Perhaps his greatest delusion throughout the novel is that of his culpability regarding his wife's death. Initially clinging to the idea that she had mental health problems to explain a suicide that he views as unexpected and sudden, Bunny is increasingly haunted and chased by her image, and yet she warned him from the very opening scene that he should have come home. He had an opportunity to prevent her death from the very start. Bunny's determination to ignore his grief and loss plays out in such a fascinating way as it is instead the characters around him who, not caught up in his delusional fantasies, consistently point out how sad he seems, and repeatedly query whether he is well, exposing the truth hidden within Bunny's narrative. In the end, it is not his repeatedly womanising that drives Libby to suicide alone but the realisation that her husband rapes people, as she arrives on the scene of one of these rapes and, with this, appears to give up. By the closing pages of the novel, it is clear that Libby never had any intention to haunt Bunny but was, in fact, wholly concerned with her son: Bunny Jr. She seems remarkably unbothered by Bunny's efforts to reconcile, assuring him that they will have plenty of time to do that, and, instead saying she is happy because Bunny Jr. will be okay, seemingly removing Bunny from her narrative for good.

Perhaps at the heart of the novel, however, is the relationship between Bunny and his son. Initially starting with the young boy idolising his father, while a determined love remains to the end, Bunny Jr. slowly adopts a carer role for his father as the 'navigator' and recognises his many flaws and deep entrenched unhappiness. Bunny, by comparison, is wholly ill-equipped to be a father, selfish and thoughtless, and pulls his son from school to instead tour Brighton with him instead. Having realised that he can use women to plug the hole of his own loneliness, rejection and ill-treatment at the hands of his own acerbic, lecherous and foul father at a very young age (and while at Butlins, no less), Bunny struggles immediately with the idea of pure love that one might feel for a child. Indeed, he feels excluded from Libby and Bunny Jr.'s love almost immediately in the hospital room, both unable to grapple with his own feelings of love for the boy and with the idea of the woman who he views as 'all for his delight' having her attention diverted. By the end of the book, Bunny is ready to parent and to love, and yet perhaps the kindest act as a parent is to not be in his son's life, to not commit the damage that his father did to him. The fantasy at Butlin's is strangely heartbreaking in that it is exactly that: his final act of fiction. What Bunny and Libby instead seem to achieve, both inadvertently on his part and through ghostly means by hers, is an independence and confidence in their child as, in his final act, he breaks free from the cycles that trapped his father, and his grandfather, and does not seek solace in the arms (or hand) of a woman. He is okay alone, whereas Bunny, who screams for someone to fuck him in his final moments alive, could never be.

Cave's language is beautiful and raw and lyrical throughout this story and he sustains a sense of creeping doom and damnation throughout. From the actual journey of a devil travelling down the country and, seemingly, targeting women, to the sense that Bunny is being broken down to his most base self until he faces a final retribution at the hands of the devil himself. Whether this fantasy, or the Butlin's fantasy, are more believable, ultimately, he meets his end with some regret and some understanding of the fact that he just couldn't be good in this world. His ability to live a life without delusion seems less sure, but Libby's unsettling promise that they can talk more later suggests that perhaps the afterlife will bring a more comprehensive reckoning for Bunny than Butlins did.

Super, super, SUPER eff'd up. I didn't dislike it, really, but I sort of wish I'd never read it. ::Shivers::

Some good ideas, good writing, but the book as whole didnt add up,to anything..

This is a raw and ugly and poetic tale of a miserable man who does not know what to do with his life and his 9-year-old son. This book filled me with disgust, then sadness and finally a deep determination to live a meaningful life and be a good father, whatever that might be.

I thought it was okay. It was less strange than I had anticipated (and wanted); mostly just overly sexual. There were some minor weird elements to it, but I've read so much odder things that this left me a little disappointed. I am not familiar with Cave's music either; maybe I would have appreciated it more had I done a little musical research prior to reading it. It wasn't a bad book and made for a pretty quick read, I just wasn't all that crazy about it.

Although not poorly written, the storyline was boring with a highly unlikable main character