The Death of Bunny Munro: it’ll be nice when it’s finished
Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro has rightly received upbeat notices elsewhere. For a book written by a rock star hobby novelist it’s admirably free of writerly showing off and holds the reader’s attention until the final line. It’s even rarer for a modern novel to be unencumbered by typographical and editing errors. At least, it is until you get to the ending; I’m going to be charitable and suggest it’s bad editing and not bad writing. Because it would be unusual for a writer to destroy so much of the goodwill he’s created in the preceding pages in the final paragraph. This book succeeds with a clunker. I’d go as far as to say I was loving it until I got to the final line, and I say this largely because I haven’t seen the ending referred to in any of the other reviews I’ve read.The editors at the Text Publishing Company deserve to be locked in a room with access only to style manuals for a month for letting it go to press. It has a “Will this do?” quality, not to mention a tautology worthy of the late Hylda Baker. Anyway, you be the judge. Here, with the obligatory SPOILER ALERT for those who haven’t read it, is the final paragraph in its entirety.
“Bunny Junior watches a policewoman with long blonde hair trailing behind her like moulded plastic and her radio transmitter squelching its own private language and her warm, merciful, adult face smiling down at him as she kneels on the street and says, ‘Come on, little man, let me help you,’ and Bunny Junior gently pushes her outstretched hand to one side and, standing, stands up above.”
posted by Chris Bell at 11:15 AM
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