BUNNY BOILER; NICK CAVE TALKS US THROUGH HIS CRACKING NEW NOVEL.

Byline: HENRY SUTTON 

In a rare interview, legendary Aussie rock star Nick Cave reveals the inspiration behind his extraordinary new novel,

The Death Of Bunny Munro (Canongate pounds 16.99). The novel, Cave's second, features a door-to-door salesman whose life is spiralling out of control on the south coast of England.

It's 20 years since the publication of your last novel, And The Ass Saw The Angel. Why the wait?

Firstly, I was sort of tied up being a world-famous rock star. A very demanding job, that. Secondly, writing the first one nearly killed me. It took three years and I was lucky to have crawled out of that experience in one piece. It took 20 years to work out that prose writing didn't necessarily need to be life-threatening.

The real joy of Bunny's character stems from his flouting of convention and his excessive libido.

Well, obviously much of Bunny is monstrous and I'm not suggesting that he's a great role model. But I do admire his dedication and commitment to his desires. He's a tragic character who is actually on a terrifying flight, not toward love, but away from it.

"There was just too much love," he says at one point as he ducks out of a maternity ward for a cigarette. I guess one of the things I was trying to do was to stretch the reader's sympathy for the central character as far as I could - that they recognised in him something of themselves, but at the same time were repulsed by his behaviour.

Bunny's relationship with his son, Bunny Junior, moves from one of neglect to tender, caring love. How important is the idea of a father-son relationship to the novel, and what influences were you drawing on here?

What interested me most in the writing of that relationship was to create a dynamic where the worse Munro's behaviour became, the more Bunny Junior loved him.

He is only nine and thinks his father is the best dad in the world. Nothing will dissuade him of this. This sets up an interesting basis for a novel - the more despicable the behaviour of the key character becomes, the more he is loved for it.

The south coast, with all its down-at-heel dampness and smalltown mentality is vividly drawn in the book. Why there?

The version of the coast in the novel is seen from the point of view of a man whose life is going down the toilet. These are his end days and on some level he knows it.

At the beginning of the novel, Bunny drives along the seafront and sees it to be the most glorious sun-filled place on the planet. But after the death of his wife, and throughout his ill-fated road trip, Bunny's perspective on the world rapidly deteriorates.

For what it's worth, I love the south coast of England and wouldn't live anywhere else.

How would you describe your ambitions as a novelist?

I have no ambitions, actually, except to keep working. As long as I am engaged in the particular project I'm working on - be it songwriting composing for the movies, touring, scriptwriting, novel writing or whatever - I am relatively content. This is my ambition, actually, to stay content and engaged. I don't much care what kind of work that entails.

Kylie Minogue's gold hot-pants play a part, but it's Avril Lavigne who pops into Bunny Munro's mind with alarming regularity. Why is that?

Well, I'm not sure, except that Avril Lavigne is hot, right? She just seemed the right kind of girl for our hero to obsess over.

What's up next for you?

I have got a new album out with Warren Ellis called White Lunar, which is some of the most beautiful music I've been involved with. I'm also just finishing up a new Grinderman album which, of course, is something else entirely. On it goes.

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MAN OF MANY TALENTS: Author and rock star Nick Cave