Seven-week old Nathaniel Byng doesn't seem to mind the long, bony finger poking his tummy. In fact, he's fascinated by the finger (covered almost to the knuckle with a gold and red-stone ring) and the tall, sepulchral figure leaning over him. Anyone over the age of seven weeks might wisely look at the pale face and curtain of black hair, and think: “Death! Get me the hell out of here!” But there are benefits to being blissfully preliterate, and having Nick Cave give you a cuddle is one of them.
“What colour do you think his eyes are going to be?” Cave asks Nathaniel's dad, Jamie Byng, the head of Canongate Books, and the disconnect is complete. Who knew Cave was a tummy-tickler, a baby-lover? Former heroin addict, yes. Celebrated musical chronicler of murderers, outlaws and dwellers on the fringe, absolutely. But Mr. Coochy Coo? We all contain multitudes.
The myth has long reached its sell-by date, as Cave will patiently tell anyone who asks: He's an office man now, stuck in a basement in Hove, on the southern coast of England, writing songs, a husband and father.
He's a different person now. How then to explain Bunny Munro, the central figure in his new novel, The Death of Bunny Munro , a man so comically depraved that when he hears a Kylie Minogue song on the radio he ... actually, I can't put that in a family newspaper. Or when he thinks of Avril Lavigne he.… No, that's definitely not printable.
“He's an extreme case,” says Cave, a smile slowly breaking across his face. When he speaks, there are long pauses as he gathers his thoughts and forms them into pleasing sentences. It's only 11 a.m.; a bit early for him. “He hasn't learned to live successfully in society, shall we say. Men can learn to survive within the world in a dignified way, but there's some reptilian side of our brains that's at work all the time.”
He gives a slow, rolling, slightly dirty chuckle. Nathaniel has gone off to be fed by his dad, who is Cave's publisher, and we've moved to a low sofa in Byng's tasteful living room, which was once painted in shades of silver and purple when its former owner, Blur's Damon Albarn, lived here. (“We had to tone it down a bit,” Byng explained, to which Cave responded, deadpan, “Why would you do that?”) Bunny is the product of rock 'n' roll; Cave wrote the novel in long-hand in six weeks while on tour with his band, the Bad Seeds. He'd taken a challenge from his friend, the Australian director John Hillcoat, to write a screenplay incorporating three elements: a travelling salesman, a scene from the afterworld and Butlins, a low-rent British holiday camp. Hillcoat had filmed Cave's scary revenge script The Proposition in 2005, but when no one would touch the Bunny Munro screenplay, Cave decided to turn it into a novel.
He sponged up the testosterone around him, in tour buses and hotels, environments free from feminizing influences: “I hate to admit it, but the dialogue is straight from backstage.” He surfed to the bottom of the male id, rooted around in the rubble, and found Bunny, an alcoholic, drug-abusing, skirt-chasing salesman of beauty products, unfettered by morality – and often, his pants.
The novel's a bit Portnoy's Complaint, a lot early Martin Amis. It's lewd, it's surreal, it's very funny – and, according to its author, misunderstood. The charges of misogyny initially hurt, Cave says, but now he's just ignoring them. Why does writing about something equate to condoning it? “Surely,” he says, “I'm looking at that issue, facing it and railing against it.”
In the process of railing, however, there is an awful lot of objectifying female genitalia. In particular, Bunny is obsessed with the intimate parts of two women he idealizes: Kylie Minogue (Cave's friend and one-time collaborator) and Avril Lavigne (whom he's never met). How does he feel about exposing Canada's sweetheart in this fashion?
