News

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?

“Is she Canadian? Oh, God.” For a moment, Cave looks horrified.

Uh-huh.

His face says: Yikes. He'll be reading in Toronto today and in Ottawa tomorrow, not far, it is gently revealed to him, from Lavigne's hometown of Napanee, Ont. Cave chokes back a laugh, and says: “I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to her, to her family and to her friends and fans. I've had a huge respect for Avril. It's unfortunate she got caught in Bunny Munro's crosshairs.”

I'm having trouble imagining him being intimidated by a teeny-tiny rock chick. He'll be 52 next week and he's given up his licence to debauch, he still looks like the love child of Lucifer and Leonard Cohen: scythe-thin, dyed black hair combed back, narrow pin-striped suit impeccably pressed, shirt open to expose a chest webbed with gold chains. The voice is deep and sly, as it is on records. If you met him at the crossroads, you'd ask where to sign.

Hell and purgatory on Earth have long been the landscape for his songs, from the early days with the Birthday Party to the newer Grinderman, with his long-time band the Bad Seeds wedged in between. Damnation (southern gothic variety) was also the undercurrent in his first novel, 1989's And the Ass Saw the Angel, which he wrote over three years in Berlin, and which, he has said, “nearly killed” him.

“Well, that decade nearly did me in,” he says. “And the next.” That's the only reference he makes to a substance-abuse problem. The wildness started early – as a barely pubescent schoolboy in Australia, Cave was tossed out of school, allegedly for pulling a girl's underpants down – and had at least one terrible consequence. When Cave was 21, and being held by the police for drunkenness and making mischief, his mother arrived at the station to bail him out. While there, a police officer approached them with the news that Cave's father, Colin, had been killed in a car accident.

He may deny any autobiographical connection to The Death of Bunny Munro, but it doesn't take a shrink to see that the emotional core of the story is the relationship between desperate, messed-up Bunny and his hopeful, resourceful son, Bunny Jr. The boy's talisman is his encyclopedia; when Nick Cave was young, his father, an English teacher, used to read to him from grown-up books – including, memorably, Lolita.

Now he does the same thing with his own kids, “though I haven't read them Lolita yet.” Cave has four boys, a set of nine-year-old twins and two older sons, whose birth dates only days apart to different mothers hint at a complicated romantic history.

The twins, in particular, were a huge influence on the book. “Just watching them, the way they flap their little feet when they're nervous,” Cave says. “All those small things are huge.” The Death of Bunny Munro is dedicated to their mother, Cave's wife of 10 years, Susie Bick. One wonders if this is a compliment with more than one facet, given that the wife in the novel is driven to despair by her useless, date-raping husband. What exactly did Mrs. Cave make of the book?

“She said, ‘Hey, it's just like you. In the best possible way.'” Another long, knowing pause. “I'm still trying to work out what that meant.”

Nick Cave will be holding a question-and-answer session and book signing at Indigo Books in the Eaton Centre, Toronto, Wednesday at 7 (416-591-3622) and will appear Thursday at the Ottawa Writers Festival, 7 p.m., at Saint Brigid's Centre for the Arts and Humanities, 314 Saint Patrick St. (613-562-1243).