Bunny Munro's grief

Bunny Munro’s grief after Libby Munro’s death is not a single passage from shock to acceptance but a recurring condition that unsettles his grasp of reality, his care for Bunny Junior, and his understanding of his marriage. It surfaces in mechanical routines, guilt over the damaged home, involuntary memories of Libby, and visions in which her absence seems briefly reversed. The novel places his mourning beside his son’s effort to preserve his mother’s image, giving their losses different forms rather than a shared, easy resolution.

Disorientation and the first days

After an encounter with the police and ambulance at his block, Bunny Munro clings to a metal railing during a fresh attack of vertigo. He feels detached from anything resembling reality and cannot imagine what to do next. His bewilderment is not merely a reaction that he can set aside: the narrative makes it physical, a loss of balance and direction. Even the scene below, where residents gather and glance up at him, finds him unable to recover a stable place in the world.

In the days that follow, he arranges the funeral and answers calls of enquiry and commiseration in a zoned-out, robotic state. Calling Libby’s mother, Doris Pennington, is especially fraught. Her contempt reaches back to the time Libby left Bunny and returned to her mother, and the novel recalls the cum-stained underwear in Bunny’s old Toyota as an emblem of the earlier damage between the couple. When Doris receives the news, the silence on the line overwhelms him. After the call has ended, Bunny continues to listen, convinced he can detect the distant rhythms of Libby’s voice in the phone wires. Grief turns an ordinary object of communication into a possible channel to the dead, though it gives him no clear message.

His behavior at home sharpens the contrast between outward functioning and inner collapse. He watches television without interest, drinks beer, and smokes almost automatically; as evening darkens, emotion appears in small involuntary signs, including trembling hands and a creased forehead. He then reaches for malt whisky in a heavy glass and drinks repeatedly before calling someone and hearing deep, wet coughing at the other end. The sequence shows routine failing to contain what has been building: the movement from blankness to sudden drinking is a rupture, not relief.

The damaged home and helplessness

As Bunny tries to clear the flat, the damage Libby left behind makes their conflict materially present. His CDs are floating in the toilet cistern; a bootleg Tommy and Pamela video, given to him by his employer, Geoffrey, has been pulled apart and hung around the bedroom light. In the bathroom, a fork has been driven through Bunny’s company-party headshot, leaving a pattern on the wallpaper. He reads these acts as a private language of blame. They bring guilt and resentment together: he remembers that Libby was depressed and that doctors attributed her condition to her synapses, but the destruction still feels personal to him. Understanding that she was ill does not undo his sense of having been accused, nor does his sense of injury answer the guilt he cannot explain.

Two social workers arrive unannounced to check how Bunny and Bunny Junior are coping. Bunny has made some effort to restore order and is glad of it, but wishes he were more sober. He responds to the visit with little beyond monosyllables. His attention repeatedly fixes on Jennifer’s appearance rather than on her suggestions of grief counselling and support groups; then, under the pressure of the visit and his remembered loss, he falls to his knees and buries his face in her lap, sobbing. He asks what he is going to do, and only then discovers that his face is wet with real tears. His sexual arousal during the breakdown makes the scene disturbing rather than consoling: desire and grief coexist without becoming interchangeable, and Bunny himself is startled by the collision. He releases Jennifer, apologises, and accepts a Kleenex. The practical offer of help does not resolve his helplessness, but the tears make visible what his robotic conduct had concealed.

Memory, fatherhood, and the marriage he left

Bunny’s memories return unevenly, often prompted by the present. A memory associated with Libby leaves him sad and deflated. Another takes him back to the Royal Sussex County Hospital, where Libby holds their newborn son against her breast with her whole heart in her love for him. Bunny understands in that moment that everything has changed, but experiences the child’s arrival as an ejector seat carrying him beyond the limits of the marriage. Faced with Libby’s love and the infant in her arms, he cannot find words for either; instead of saying goodbye, he asks for a cigarette and leaves the hospital for the rain-filled street. The memory makes his grief inseparable from an earlier failure of presence. He does not mourn only Libby’s death; he also revisits the distance he felt when she and their child were drawing close.

That recollection breaks into the present as Bunny slaps the table and shakes his head, as if trying to dislodge it. Elsewhere, he looks at Bunny Junior and struggles to believe the child is there or to know what he should do for him. He thinks of himself as an extinct volcano and of the boy as strange, registering both paralysis and estrangement. His grief therefore bears directly on fatherhood: his son’s need does not automatically make Bunny feel capable of responding, even though the boy’s presence is one of the few constants in the aftermath.

Bunny Junior’s mourning offers a revealing contrast. He can recall detailed facts from his encyclopaedia but finds Libby’s face increasingly difficult to summon. He tries to preserve memories of shared days like exhibits in the Booth Museum, yet in the remembered scene of being pushed on a swing at St Ann’s Well Gardens he can picture himself laughing and rising into the air while the figure pushing him dissolves. His fear of losing her image shows that the mother’s absence is changing as time passes, not simply remaining fixed. Bunny’s own grief is more entangled with guilt, marital history, and his bodily habits; his son’s is bound to the fading of specific memories and the effort to keep their mother perceptible.

The continuing bond and an unresolved farewell

The book gives Bunny Junior encounters with Libby as experiences that feel intimate and immediate without settling whether they are visions or supernatural visitations. In the Punto on Meeching Road in Newhaven, he senses a change in the air and the smell of his mother’s hand cream, then feels a touch on his brow. The image of Libby’s finger tracing his face culminates in a voice telling him he is the most luminous object in the universe. Later, mist gathers around the car and Bunny Junior sees his mother in her orange nightdress, beckoning from a low wall. He leaves the car, sits beside her, and apologises; she puts an arm around him, and he recognises her as truly his mother. These scenes give the boy a form of closeness that his fading visual memories cannot provide, while leaving the status of the encounter open.

At the public gathering near the end, grief becomes collective as people cry and embrace Bunny. Moving through the crowd, he encounters women and others who forgive him, then sees Libby in her orange nightdress and asks her to forgive him. He says that he went a bit crazy and missed her; the confession gives his bereavement an audible shape before witnesses. When Bunny asks whether she has been haunting him, Libby denies it. Her response does not confirm that the earlier appearances were objectively real, nor does it erase Bunny’s sense of being pursued by her absence. She laughs, says she will see him in a minute, and disappears beneath the umbrellas of the weeping crowd. The exchange offers tenderness without final explanation: Bunny gets to address Libby, but not to convert the encounter into a settled account of death, blame, or reunion. His grief remains a continuing relation, shaped by longing and regret rather than completed by a single act of forgiveness.