KEY POINTS:
To get into the spirit of my interview with Will Self, I should have travelled on foot from my north London address to his Stockwell residence rather than catching the Tube.
For the 45-year-old author - who made his debut in 1991 with satirical short story collection The Quantum Theory of Insanity - has become renowned for the long walks he regularly embarks upon, including a controversial journey from his south London home to Heathrow airport, which he chronicled in last year's Ralph Steadman-illustrated Psychogeography.
"It's quite a walk, a nice walk," Self notes, brewing tea on a gas camp stove as we sit in his top-floor study. "I've done it. It would take you a good two and a half hours."
Set in a fictional, semi-tropical country, the narrative of Self's latest novel, The Butt, takes the form of a walkabout as American tourist Tom Brodzinski is forced to travel into the island continent's harsh interior after inadvertently violating its strict anti-smoking laws.
Partly inspired by contemporary Iraq, the unnamed nation is based geographically on Australia - although there are several elements, including references to moas and taro, which have a distinct Kiwi or Polynesian flavour.
However, Self, who visited Australia on several occasions after his late father emigrated to Canberra, has never been to New Zealand. "It's possible that there are things in there that are from New Zealand," he admits.
"It's a bricolage. I've borrowed a lot of things. The binturong really exists, it's a Malaysian creature, and the whole idea of the 'Feltham Islanders' is like the Polynesians, they are off-islanders. That was in order to de-centre it and not make it too recognisably one place. I wanted it to have an ambiguity about it."
Indeed, the customs of the Tayswengo and the composite country's other numerous other native tribes have more in common with Maori than Aborigines.
"I remember being in King's Canyon in central Australia and there was this guy running the bar who I couldn't figure out," recalls Self.
"He had coppery skin, very fine features and a sharp, triangular nose. He was a big guy and he carried himself very confidently. I asked my friend what ethnicity he was and he replied, 'He's a Maori.' The Maori are exceptional, aren't they?
They fought to a draw and got hold of guns. They couldn't be defeated and the post-colonial settlement in New Zealand is different as a result."
Modelled closely on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which was also the basis of Apocalypse Now, the post-colonial experience lies at the heart of The Butt.
"It is not overstated but it's not actually an ex-British colony," says Self. "The ex-colonial power seems to have been the Belgians, which is an allusion to Heart of Darkness. I must have first read it when I was in my teens or 20s and I am actually re-reading it now, as I didn't read it while I was writing The Butt. It's such a powerful fable of the colonial experience; it is inexplicably bound up with our perceptions.
It's a modern myth in that way so its structure, or aspects of it, was in my mind. It's like a road movie - a river movie. The picaresque and the journey into the unknown."
Like many others, Self re-evaluated Heart of Darkness - which he has described as "deeply ambivalent about colonialism" - after 9/11 and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. "Iraq is a post-colonial invention," he says.
"In a sense, you invent the country to suit your preoccupation. I wanted to suggest a kind of 'otherness' and to look at the way this kind of white utilitarian therapeutic state has been imposed on this very 'other' place. Things like, in this particular case, the anti-smoking legislation. Here [in Britain] it's just another law but that's the way it has been there for thousands of years so it has a kind of organic quality.
Because the white presence is so new in Australia, it seems like a fresh lick of paint on this very ancient place with these other people who have been there a long time." According to Self, Iraq is a case in point.
"I thought the analogy that worked was how the neo-conservatives thought they could export liberal democracy through the barrel of a gun; how in Iraq, you could steam into a country which has had its own political traditions going back for many millennia. I wanted to draw readers' attention to that but I never wanted it to be all about that. Political allegory never works when it's too straightforward."
The Butt represents a welcome departure for Self, who needed a break from writing about his hometown after his last novel, 2006's The Book of Dave, which alternated between present day and a far future London. "I was kind of Londoned-out after Dave," he laughs.
"I thought of The Butt after I had just finished The Book of Dave and we were on holiday in north Queensland. But I couldn't set it in Australia because I am a great purist about places and I think you really have to know somewhere to write about it.
"London is very dominant for me and I have got another big London book planned, which I am going to write next year, so I wanted to get away for a bit."
* The Butt (Bloomsbury $39.95)
