At one point in Boy on Fire, music critic Mark Mordue’s strange, hybrid biography and social history of the early years and musical development of singer–songwriter Nick Cave, Mordue describes his subject as ‘the nominal ship’s captain, a drug-spun Ahab running amok on stage and off’. It is a typically sharp image, but it may reveal more than was intended; for all that Cave is Mordue’s Ahab, he is far more like the white whale itself: a great and receding mythical creature that will swallow the world before giving up any of its secrets. For a long while, the reader is cajoled into thinking this work might be the first in an exhaustive series on the artist, but by the end the truth is revealed: the subject simply got the better of his biographer, who languishes still in the belly of the whale. After an unnaturally long gestation, it seems to have become a case of publish or go mad.

Lecturing in Vienna in 1999, Nick Cave outlined his theory on the nature of the love song. ‘Within the fabric of the Love Song … one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering.’ Unless pain and longing simmer beneath the surface of the music, it isn’t a love song at all. What Lorca referred to as ‘duende’ and Cave himself calls ‘an inexplicable sadness’ at the heart of the love song is evidenced in even the most cursory sampling of his oeuvre. From the despairing lilt of ‘Where Do We Go Now but Nowhere’ to the apocalyptic cheer of ‘Straight to You’, the darkness and desperation of love are constants in his work.

Nick Cave, against the odds, is one of the great survivors of Australian music. Cave, who made his first recording in 1978 and established his international reputation after moving to London in 1982, has experienced critical and popular success with a variety of musical ventures including The Boys Next Door, The Birthday Party, Grinderman and, most notably, The Bad Seeds. It is a measure of Cave’s durability that it is difficult to think of any other Australian rock act, with the exception of AC/DC, that has maintained an international profile for such an extended period. It is also salutary to consider how few of the international acts that emerged from the punk and post-punk moment of the late 1970s are still making high-profile and critically acclaimed music.

            Cave’s ambitions have not been limited to music. As the dust jacket to Cultural Seeds proclaims, he is ‘now widely recognized as a songwriter, musician, novelist, screenwriter, curator, critic, actor and performer’. With the years, Cave has won a larger audience as the range and scope of his talent have been manifest in various forms of cultural production. His oeuvre includes works of fiction (And the Ass Saw the Angel, 1989; The Death of Bunny Munro, 2009) and a film script (The Proposition, 2005).

Although Nick Cave’s second novel makes strong claim to the musician’s skills as a writer, in the end it is too morally opaque to succeed as a work of sustained fiction. There is an overwhelming didacticism to The Death of Bunny Munro that delights too much in its own surety to be persuasive, and leads to a disappointing suspicion that, despite Cave’s renown as a populist intellectual, there is little in the book to consider besides the sexual conscience of its titular protagonist. Bunny Munro is certainly entertaining, and his exploits memorable, if puerile, but the final authorial judgement of the character is predictable, and, worse, leaves little room for readers’ thoughts. Exactly what Munro’s version of family life undone by libidinous desire contributes – even when told with remarkable lyricism – remains moot in the novel.