‘She looks like she has been designed solely with a compass,’ is Bunny Munro’s description of a waitress from early on in Nick Cave’s new novel, a book which equally seems composed of big, simple and often inelegant shapes. Bunny Munro is a door-to-door salesman of beauty products whose life is thrown into confusion with the abrupt and unexpected death of his wife. His days are normally spent over-indulging in fast-food, booze and (above all) affairs with his clients and anyone else who strays into his path, but now he has to cart around his son with him: the naive but infinitely receptive Bunny Junior. His father’s world is one of grotesquely exaggerated dimensions, a stylised over-indulgence which reminded me of Money by Martin Amis in all its rather implausible, pornographic excess. But this is a shorter and simpler book by far.
Libraryland
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