Death of a Ladies Man

"Bunny Munro is an ultra-lech. An alpha-lech. He lives out those fantasies of irresistibility and unaccountability that are harboured even in the dimmest of minds. It doesn’t matter that in every one of his debauched episodes, there’s already traces of depression, pangs of decline, a stud turning… Stringfellow. Bunny is obsessed with sex to the point it goes beyond sex and becomes something approaching the demented, the hallucinatory. He sees women as Hans Bellmer dolls or as disembodied floating genitalia. In one memorably depraved scene, he looks out upon women in a park on a summer’s day and instead sees a seething cornucopia of flesh. In another, “he thinks with a sudden terrible, bottomless dread, of Avril Lavigne’s vagina.”

Reviewing Nick Cave's new novel The Death of Bunny Munro over on 3:AM Magazine.

On a completely different note, have an article in this month's Verbal Magazine (available as pdf file online or in print via The Derry Journal and Belfast News for those in the north) on forgotten female Irish writers (including the anti-Cecilia Aherne the great Lola Ridge) that was written for International Women's Day but fell through the cracks.

"A land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens, whose firesides for the wisdom of serene old age." So went President De Valera's vision for the new Irish state, broadcast over the radio to the nation on St Patrick's Day 1943. By implication, De Valera was also outlining what his Ireland would not be. In effect, cosmopolitanism and enlightenment would be sacrificed for a sleepy parochial version of Ireland. That this idealised land of “comely maidens” and “cosy homesteads” had never existed before (nor ever really could given human nature) was beside the point. It was just the acceptable face of the prevailing puritan streak in Church and State, the same smothering conservatism that had driven the nation's greatest cultural figures to take refuge abroad (Joyce, Wilde, Beckett, Yeats) or in the undeclared free-thinking republic that were the bars of Dublin (Behan, Kavanagh, O'Brien) or even the grave as in the sad disgraceful case of Charles Stewart Parnell. Within this blueprint, the role of women would largely follow the German model of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). The idea of Kathleen Ni Houlihan as Ireland's poetic embodiment had less to do with any high opinion of women and more to do with placing them safely on a pedestal, out of sight out of mind, a sort of silencing by romanticising. Thankfully, there have been plenty of fearless female writers prepared to subvert stereotypes, create unique visions at great personal cost and who, despite everything, refuse to be written out of history."

PS Thanks to Kevin Williamson, Jenni Fagan, Word Power and everyone who showed up at the recent reading for a great night.