The dead side

The dead side names the uncertain boundary between the living and the dead as it is experienced by Bunny Munro and Bunny Junior after Libby Munro’s death. It is not presented as a clearly defined afterlife or as a single, settled explanation for their visions. Instead, Libby’s absence returns through memory, familiar objects, and glimpses that the living characters interpret differently: to Bunny, her presence can feel like an accusation or demand; to his son, it is bound up with longing and the fear that memory itself is disappearing.

A boundary without a fixed explanation

The phrase enters Bunny’s experience when he stands on a gangway, leans over a balcony, and senses that some kind of demand is coming from the other side, which he identifies as the dead side. He cannot say what is being asked of him. He descends and crosses the estate courtyard toward the Punto, turning an obscure inward apprehension into movement, though the direction or purpose of that movement is not explained. The episode makes the dead side less a mapped destination than a pressure on the living: something is perceived, but its meaning remains beyond Bunny’s grasp.

That uncertainty is prepared by other moments in which Bunny feels observed. While raising a glass of wine, he has the eerie impression that the scene is not his alone, as if he and the women present were being watched by someone else; he looks over his shoulder to check. Elsewhere, during an intimate encounter with River, he sees Libby by the window, partly hidden in rose-coloured curtains, wearing the Orange dressing gown and waving. Startled, he breaks off his attention to River and says that his wife was there and watching. The episode establishes the apparition as Bunny’s experience, not as a fact confirmed by anyone else. Its force lies in the sudden collapse of privacy: even an immediate, living situation seems open to the gaze of the dead.

Two forms of continued presence

Bunny Junior’s relation to the dead side is shaped by a different fear: that his mother’s image is fading. He can recall the year construction of the Eiffel Tower began, yet finds it increasingly difficult to remember what Libby looked like. He tries to preserve shared moments as though they were exhibits, fixed in time like the stuffed birds at the Booth Museum. But the attempt cannot keep the person whole. In the remembered scene of Libby pushing him on a swing at St Ann’s Well Gardens, he can still picture himself laughing in the air, while the figure doing the pushing has become a dissolving, incomplete presence. His mother remains emotionally central even as her face becomes harder for him to summon.

The novel sets that fading memory beside vivid apparitions. After Bunny disappears from his view, Bunny Junior sees a blonde woman in an Orange dressing gown near the stairwell; she turns away and vanishes into shadow. Later, while alone in the Punto on Meeching Road in Newhaven, he believes his mother will eventually find him. He associates her approach with the familiar smell of her hand cream and feels her touch on his brow. The scene links bodily memory to the hope of reunion, without establishing whether the presence is supernatural, imagined, or some combination the boy cannot separate.

In another vision, Bunny Junior sees Libby sitting on a low wall opposite the car, smiling and beckoning him over through the mist. He gets out, goes to her, and sits beside her; the encounter brings a feeling of warmth. He asks whether this is what she wanted to tell him. That question gives the vision the shape of a conversation, but the available account does not establish a complete message. The scene therefore holds together comfort and uncertainty: the boy experiences contact, yet the content and status of that contact remain unresolved.

Recognition, guilt, and the denial of haunting

Bunny’s encounters take on a moral dimension as the novel approaches its ending. At a public gathering, he sees Libby through the crowd in her Orange dressing gown and moves toward her, asking her to forgive him. Her appearance meets his plea, but it does not turn his earlier impressions into an uncomplicated account of a ghost pursuing him. In a later exchange, Libby says that she never haunted him, even as she flickers through the scene. The denial unsettles Bunny’s interpretation rather than supplying a definitive explanation: the experiences were real to him, but his belief that she was haunting him is not endorsed as the truth about her intentions.

The dead side thus gathers several distinct pressures without reducing them to one. Bunny feels watched, senses an unnamed demand, and eventually addresses Libby in the language of forgiveness. Bunny Junior tries to keep his mother present by preserving memories and, in visions, by approaching her. For him, the threat is not chiefly judgment but erasure: the remembered swing remains while its central figure fades. Their experiences share the possibility of continued connection, but differ in emotional direction and consequence. The novel leaves the boundary open, allowing grief to appear both as an inward bond and as an encounter whose meaning cannot be securely explained.