Grace made powerful in disturbing novel

By Kurt Armstrong and ChristianWeek | November 3, 2009

"I am damned," is the first and abiding thought we hear from the title character in this shocking novel from Nick Cave.

Bunny Munro is a traveling salesman with an out of control sex drive. He charms women into buying products they don't need and woos them into satisfying his obsessive, selfish desires. When his wife commits suicide, Bunny takes his son, Bunny Jr. on the road with him, leaving the boy in the car at the various stops as he goes about his business.

Bunny is convinced that he is about to die. All around he sees signs of his imminent death: visions of his deceased wife, a mushroom cloud on a woman's t-shirt, news reports of killer dressed up in a devil costume who seems to be headed straight for Bunny.

But this sense of his mortality only fuels his obsession: "He is coming to believe that there are forces at work, within and around him, over which he has no control." He remembers goodness—love for his wife, love for his son—but he's powerless against the evil within and around him.

Racing towards self-destruction, he meets a prophetic old woman who quotes Auden to him: "We must love one another or die." It's clear that Bunny wishes he could love, but he can't. It seems he's right: he is damned.

But love is stronger than death. In his final moments, Bunny gets one last shot at redemption, and he finally confesses his sins. "He talks about the people he has taken advantage of—how he has treated the world and everything in it with utter contempt." His sin has been fueled by his fear of love: "the very existence of [love] terrified him and had him running scared." Now love has caught up to him, and his eleventh hour encounter with love has the power to cast out fear.

This is not a pretty novel. Cave's descriptions of Bunny's exploits are very graphic and disturbing. But Bunny's redemption is all the more powerful because of the depth of his depravity. Like Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, Bunny is a truly despicable man. Yet he, too, proves that no sinner is beyond the reach of everlasting love. Cave takes us to the very bottom of Bunny's hopelessness but raises us up with the undying promise of hope and redemption.

It's certainly not for everyone. But with this book, Cave joins the ranks of Flannery O'Connor, Graham Greene and Shusaku Endo as masterful writers with a profound understanding of divine grace.