‘There is general panic in the Midlands. The police continued to be baffled.
“He’s just getting started,” mutters Bunny, the flicker of the TV reflecting in his upside-down eyes. “and he’s coming this way.”’
Watching Nick Cave read from the end of chapter 11 of THE DEATH OF BUNNY MUNRO last night was a strange experience. It wasn’t weird seeming him read, in fact he seems to be growing very comfortable as a reader and raconteur as well. What was interesting was hearing this passage being read in front of David Peace, who was chairing the event at the Purcell Room on London’s South Bank.
The horned killer in Cave’s novel, a ferocious figure glimpsed in terrifying newsreels, seems to percolate his way south through the mythic bedrock of Great Britain, towards an inevitable meeting with Bunny Munro in Brighton. Bunny’s violent, hallucinatory nemesis resembles the nebulous and ominous figure at the centre of Peace’s RED RIDING QUARTET, the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, who similarly left police ‘baffled’ and inflicted horrendous suffering upon his female victims.
In some respect the horned killer is a red herring in Cave’s novel, although when Bunny does meet him it provides one of the most vivid and patently Cave-esque moments in the book. Peace was an interesting choice to ask Cave the questions about what he called a ‘critique of masculinity’ for a character who found ‘this world a hard place to be good in’.
I’ve just started reading Gordon Burn’s SOMEBODY’S HUSBAND, SOMEBODY’S SON, in which Burn went into the life of Peter Sutcliffe and produced a piece of non-fiction that has been held up with the true crime classics such as THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG and IN COLD BLOOD. As Norman Mailer put it: ‘It’s as if Thomas Hardy were also present at the writing of this account of the Yorkshire Ripper.’
Burn, who sadly died this summer, spent three years in Bingley, soaking himself in the atmosphere of the place and you can sense the hard stone houses and steep-rising valley sides of Sutcliffe’s home town, and particularly the character of his father—a community man who begat such a terrible son.
Like Bunny Munro, Sutcliffe was, and remains, beyond redemption, but when the demons of the North come forth to harry the South, it makes for electrifying fiction.
