Rock stars tend to make for shaky novelists. Morrissey is one of the finest lyricists of all time, but his 2015 contribution to long-form fiction, List of the Lost, was widely dismissed as a black hole of purple prose.
Nor was anyone shaken or stirred by Spandau Ballet songwriter Martin Kemp’s 2023 thriller, The Game (“a fallen rock star, one last chance for redemption”).
Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro was rather more kindly received on its publication in 2009 compared to typical rock star novels. However, it is fair to say that nobody has been crying out for a small-screen adaptation.
Well, now we have one anyway (Sky Atlantic, 9pm) with Cave as executive producer and Prince Philip/Doctor Who himself, Matt Smith, taking on the part of the eponymous, womanising make-up salesman.
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The series asks a lot of Smith, who is expected to play a licentious chancer with a streak of humanity. He must be sleazy yet also sad and soulful as he reels from the suicide of his neglected wife, Libby (Cork actor Sarah Greene in flashback).
And he must strike up a meaningful relationship with his 11-year-old son, Bunny jnr (Rafael Mathé), with whom he absconds after Libby’s death.
As with Cave’s novel, Bunny Monroe is riotously sordid – though it appears to have expunged the squalid fixation the character in the book had with Avril Lavigne and Kylie Minogue (for which Cave subsequently apologised). One minute, Bunny is flogging cheap perfume to lonely women, the next, they’re in a broom cupboard or sprawled on a decaying sofa getting up close and personal.
Quite how much of this is a Nick Cave fantasy is unclear. When he read extracts from the novel in Dublin in October 2009, one woman in the audience accused him of sexism. He was, for once, lost for words.
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Cave’s music gives off a hum of Old Testament melodrama – he is obsessed with sin and redemption, brimstone and bliss. But in the Bunny Munro novel and this new adaptation, the fascination is with English decline and how, in its soul, it is still a nation of egg-and-chip suppers, of greasy spoons with grim Formica tables, of decaying holiday resorts with seaside piers that lead to nowhere.
This is Bunny’s milieu – a universe of bleak B&Bs where the closest to human connection is a romp out the back with one of the punters to whom he has just sold hand cream.
There is some humour at least. As Bunny’s friends gather for his wife’s funeral, one of them asks about “the after-party” only to be told that the correct term is “a wake”. But it’s tough to watch a child subjected to emotional neglect, as is the case with Bunny jnr, his grief over his mother taking second place to Bunny’s desire to find meaning in his life.
His method of doing so is to abscond with his son, whom social services wish to take into care, and go on a driving holiday across the south of England (the action begins in Brighton).
There’s an appropriately keening title track by Cave, and the footage of the eternally bleak English seaside is evocative – and yet, much like the novel, the point of it all remains elusive.
