When I’m first introduced to Nick Cave, he excuses himself to go out for a fag, which he promptly rolls while ordering more tea. Still rail-thin and deceptively youthful at close range (especially since losing the moustache) he is both expectedly brooding and yet incredibly charming. In his razor-sharp dark suit, he exudes the kind of confidence that has the other diners cranking up their TIFF-trained radar to try and figure out who he might be. Upon joining Cave at a dark corner table in the Hyatt’s Annona restaurant on the morning after his Sept. 16 book-signing appearance at Indigo, we embark on the following palaver about his new book, The Death of Bunny Munro.
Have you seen the book that La Trobe University put out called Cultural Seeds: Essays on the work of Nick Cave?
Yeah, I even read it.
What did you think?
I thought there were some really interesting essays in it. Some I didn’t go for.
I wrote one of them.
Oh yeah, which one did you write?
“An Audience for Antagonism,” about your relationship to the audience during Birthday Party performances and how that relates to an idea of doomed celebrity that runs through some of your later work.
That wasn’t the one where it called my stage movements gay?
No. I was talking more about the violence in your stage movements.
Good. I rather liked that, actually. To me, it was interesting that people were looking at this stuff from completely different angles. I enjoy the way that it’s not often about me, you know. It’s sort of a springboard for your own imaginations and interests and to me that’s much more interesting.
Bunny Munro, like many of your characters, is effectively doomed — is that part of your worldview or a literary device?
It’s a literary device. One of the most interesting aspects of the Bunny Monro character is that he is an addict, in his own way. And to sustain the kind of energy of addiction you can’t afford to take responsibility for your actions at all. Throughout the book he has those momentary glimpses of what he is really like and they disappear, sink back into the quicksand of his libido. He is the character who will forever make the wrong decisions.
He gets more pathetic as he goes along, and yet still maintains that addiction.
Well, I didn’t want to write your standard redemptive tale. You know there’s a formula for that kind of tale that’s taken from the bible, I guess — the Christian idea of redemption. But I didn’t want to write that sort of story. So he is just wiped off the face of the earth before he can ever take responsibility for what he does.
Being that this book is about family — as with [Cave's 2005 screenwriting venture] The Proposition and [his 1989 debut novel] And the Ass Saw the Angel — is there any chance for redemption in families?
I am fascinated with the way children can see things in a very different way. That was important for the development of the Bunny Munro character. I thought it was an interesting device: we the reader get to know what Bunny is actually up to, and the more we despise his actions, we see it through the child’s eyes, who just loves his father more and more. And it seemed like an interesting way to put forward the notion that we are able to inspire love no matter how faulty we are. There’s this great line by Nabokov, in Lolita where she comes to Humbert and she holds him and there’s this incredibly tragic line that I kind of lifted for the book that she just has nowhere else to go. And that interests me.
What was it like getting inside Bunny Munro’s head and writing from such a twisted perspective?
It’s just really enjoyable to get into the head of someone else; you start to observe things in a different way. I was writing this on tour and I think it was hugely helpful because I was constantly walking around and seeing things through this guy’s eyes. I mean I wasn’t method writing or anything — picking up chicks and trying to bang them and all this — but it changed my perspective. And that kind of sexual monologue that runs through his head became very familiar while I was writing the book.
What I wanted to do was create one of these worlds where if you enter it, it isn’t even a real world but it is familiar at the same time. In the same way as when you come out of one of the good David Lynch films, for example, and for some time you see things in a different way. You’re kind of infected by this perspective.
There’s that famous story about when Hubert Selby Jr. finished writing The Room — which is about a guy in a prison cell fantasizing quite graphically about all the people he’s killed or wants to kill — he couldn’t even read the book for like 12 years because he was so disturbed by what he had created. Did you experience anything like that?
I know what he means, except that weirdly enough there’s an aspect of Bunny Munro that was quite enjoyable. He’s really very much concerned with the surface of things: looking at the way people are dressed and all the little details and looking at the world in a hyper-real way. That’s actually an interesting way to see the world. Most of the time you just sit there and the world blurs past. But with Bunny, it often feels like he’s in a dream state. And I sort of wanted to create the feeling of a dream. It’s at once terribly real but at the same time it’s kind of detached.
Your prose is really unlike anyone else — the way you describe things definitely avoids dead metaphor and common associations. Does that come from your arts background?
It comes from me really. I’ve always connected to the world on a very visual level. People connect in different ways; people connect sonically — I mean I know that some of my musician friends are hearing the world, and this might sound a bit silly but I am seeing it. I’m kind of voyeuristic; I have a tendency to staring. Not ogling, or leering, but I’m just interested in observing people and the way they operate.
When writing And the Ass Saw the Angel, you had worked through a number of the ideas in songs like “Swampland” and on [1984 album] The Firstborn is Dead; was anything in Bunny Munro related to what you are writing about in the first few Grinderman songs?
I don’t think so. I think it’s a totally different thing. There are issues of masculinity and all that stuff, and the humour at times. But it’s a whole different thing. It’s certainly annoying when people call it the Grinderman book.
Maybe it’s the fact that Grinderman is also such a visceral experience.
The whole thing about Grinderman is really that anything goes. We take it anywhere we like or what sounds good to us. There’s something about the first album, the joyfulness about making noise. And certain strictures that were around a band that’s been together for so long were sort of lifted up and it was a very liberating thing. The new one is a very different thing; sonically it’s more challenging in a different kind of way, without giving away too much.
You also created the soundtrack for John Hillcoat’s adaptation of The Road [Hillcoat directed Cave’s screenplay The Proposition and Cave acted in their co-written 1988 prison film Ghosts… of the Civil Dead]. Do you ever get acting offers anymore?
I do, but I don’t take them. I just don’t like it; sitting around waiting to do something that you’re not very good at.