The novel’s three-part structure — the subtitles are Cocksman, Salesman and Deadman — also adheres to the tragic mode even as it sends it up. The hapless protagonist is, as the title warns us, living on borrowed time and seems, somewhere deep down in his overloaded psyche, to be acutely aware of his imminent demise. The narrative begins with the line: “‘I am damned,’ thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die.” Bunny, in short, is a dead man walking.
The book’s still center, though, and its one redeemable character, is Bunny Munro Junior, a child who hero-worships his errant father while grieving for his mother, who is driven to suicide in the book’s opening chapter by her husband’s incapacity for tenderness, empathy or love. Cave deploys pitch-black humor and a scabrous tone throughout, as signifiers of Bunny Senior’s monumental self-delusion. Like the Gospel of St Mark, this is a narrative that, for all its frantic hurly-burly, is only ever heading towards a foregone, and sacrificially violent, conclusion. Bunny Munro must die, one senses, so that his only-begotten son may live beyond his blighting shadow.
It is not often one reads a novel that includes the names of a pair of famous female pop stars in its acknowledgments. “I would like to thank Kylie Minogue and Avril Lavigne,” writes Cave, “with love, respect and apologies.” Minogue, a friend of Cave’s with whom he has duetted in the past, will undoubtedly forgive him, but one cannot help but wonder what Lavigne will make of such a twisted tale, and one that utilizes her — or, to be more precise, her vagina — as a symbol of impossible, unquenchable and terminally dysfunctional male sexual desire. Whatever, the late Valerie Solanas would almost certainly have approved.
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