We can never fit everything into THE WORD that we'd like to. Here are the "unreleased tracks" from this month's FACE TIME interview with the always-illuminating Will Self. After inviting us into his PostIt note-covered Stockwell eyrie, the author discusses his latest novel The Butt, why the reporting of drug use has become drug pornography, and why one should never offend an Australian native shaman.

In your new novel The Butt, terrible, apparently allegorical things happen to your protagonist Tom Brodzinski when he finds himself lost in an imagined hybrid country that's part Iraq and part Australia. Is that an accurate picture of your idea of how the West is behaving in Iraq?

One of the book's models is Heart Of Darkness and I wanted it to have that kind of ambiguity, where you weren't really sure what my viewpoint was. But my own feeling is that not only does the West not know who it's interacting with in Iraq, it doesn't even understand that it's actually interacting with a projection of its own devising. It's that inauthentic. This refracts into our politics in the arguments among Western liberals over the Iraq War, where the fallout was solely brokered in an argument over who was right and who was wrong - an argument purely about their own ideological positions and not concerning the real situation at all.

The central character of The Butt, Tom, isn't America, he's a cipher, he's made up of what he's not. We think he's American but we don't know - we don't know what he does, we don't even know where he is, although the country is quite Australian. There are aspects of Iraq but I wanted the feel of a post-Western colonial obviously country without it being pin-downable. I didn't have any feelings about Tom at all. He's there to be the butt.

Like all fiction writers I try not to think too hard about the psychoanalytic take on my own work, because when I do get a glimpse of it, I slightly recoil, like a cat seeing its tail. If you look at it too much you're not going to be able to do anything. Evelyn Waugh said most writers have got one or at most two books in them and you just rewrite them. I'm sure that's true, but you don't want to say it.

You were a big reader of science fiction in your teens. It clearly left a big mark on your own fiction.

I read it in my very early youth, it was more or less over by the time I was about 13, but luckily I'd read enough of the writers who were - and it sounds unfair to the genre - better than science fiction to get the best of what it had to offer. My stuff is science fiction-y in that it absolutely acknowledges that we don't live in a Newtonian world any more, as conventional narrative fiction would have you believe. Most fiction is still mired in the middle 19th century. Einstein hasn't even happened in most novels. JG Ballard was a complete genius because he understood early on that the future might be dated. For him, Cape Canaveral was already a modernist ruin. He never bought the idea that technology equalled progress.

I don't understand most conventional novels. I actually can't sit there and write a book in which nothing odd, nothing non-Newtonian, ever happened. Reality itself seems pretty twisted to me.

You've said you lost interest in pop music after you gave up drugs. How did you fill the terrifying silences that the rest of us keep at bay by putting some tunes on?

I listened to a lot of talk radio [laughs]. Live musical performances were OK because it was theatrical. Nick Cave is a friend of mine, he's a great performer so that was marvellous, and I went to a lot of classical concerts, I saw Dylan a few years ago at Brixton. But mostly I just listened to classical music because found I could suspend my disbelief in it, as I no longer could with pop music. I became the same with narrative cinema - I can barely sit through it any more. It has to be non-narrative and horribly boring and difficult to the average viewer, or I can't watch it.

Heroin use has become a spectator sport now, hasn't it? You get the latest Doherty and Winehouse developments in the morning papers.

There is a lot of drug porn about, yes, and it's become the same as sexual pornography, which is after all about witnessing a form of abandonment that the voyeur is not experiencing. People look at pornography when they're not having sex; people look at drug pornography when they're not doing drugs. It's a form of vicarious enjoyment. When you have a drug problem, as I did, the number of people who say to you "I would have taken heroin myself but I knew I would become an addict" is staggering. They're kind of right, but they still have an attraction towards it. It's not the intoxication per se, it's the state of abandonment that's attractive. So the mainstreaming of drug pornography is understandable, let's put it that way. The reasonable, moral response is that people like Pete Doherty are sick individuals who have made the wrong choices. They're in the public eye and it's grotesque, car-crash journalism. But also you have to understand why people do it and they're not entirely to be blamed for it.

Do you recognise anything of yourself in the behaviour of someone like Pete Doherty?

Not really… when my teenagers were slightly into The Libertines I remember hearing a few tracks but I didn't inquire too deeply, if indeed it's possible to inquire deeply into them. The extent to which I suffered the effects of being a legend in my own lunchtime - the hangers on - I recognised that. Even I found it absolutely deranging, and as addictive as the drug itself and presumably that's nothing compared to what he experiences. Being perceived as this mad, bad and dangerous to know individual is very seductive, and when you get the level of Doherty, Keith Richards or Winehouse the notoriety becomes the drug experience, and is in synergy with the drug. It's an awful state to be in, and I know some famous people - some very famous people - who've been like that, and they can never come back from it. It's an awful fate.

Apart from being literature's Man Who Knows About Drugs, your other master role is Vocabulary Guy. Do you consider yourself to be on a mission for the unexplored corners of the English language?

I hope the vocabulary I use is, as British ministers are wont to say, fit for purpose. I feel properly unresolved over it. I can look back on some of the stuff I've written and perhaps see what my critics see, which is what is known disparagingly in the States as "five dollar words" - as if you're just trying to gussy it up - or I can wonder why I didn't just say it in a more straightforward manner. But there is a part of me that is slightly on a mission, that says, Here's the Shorter Oxford in two volumes, there's Collins which is almost as thick, there are neologisms which are constantly astonishing… The protean quality of language attracts me.

My teenagers' slang is fantastic. "Cotching". "See you later man, we'll be cotching." [shrugs in wonder] The whole Jafaican thing, who'd have though it would happen? In hindsight it makes sense that Afro-Caribbean youth was such a lightning rod for American street culture and that it would refract into white British kids. But when I was growing up in London you wouldn't have thought you'd see, as I did the other day, two teenage girls bent down to coo over a puppy and [into accent] "Izat your dog, oh he's so beautifu', e's so LITTW…" I felt like saying to this white girl, You are so BLACK. It was so strong.

You've shown us your homo heidelbergensis hand-axe. Can you tell us a little more about the large amoutns of primitive art in your house?

It's just endlessly interesting. I worked for the Northern Territories government briefly in my early 20s and I always thought "I'm going to do something with this material." The Australian aboriginal culture just leaves you staggering: 240 languages among maybe a million people, tops. 40,000 year old continual oral culture. 40,000 years! They were the first people out of Africa 30,000 before us and walked round the coast to Australia before we had even got out of the fucking trees to go round the other way. They were the first guys out and then they basically sat in Australia doing politics for 40 millennia. They are the most political, Byzantine people imaginable. The complexity of their politics is astonishing.

And they've just done it to Kevin Rudd. I wrote a piece on land rights in the mid-90s at the point when they were just on the verge of getting white Australia to agree to de facto secession, but it all got rolled back when John Howard got in. The reason was that Howard was the first Australian premier since Gough Whitlam who hadn't let the Aboriginals take him into the bush and as they put it [adopts voice of ancient Australian] "sprinkle stardust in yer eyes". But they've done it with Rudd and that's why he got up in Parliament and said we're terribly sorry. They've definitely done a number on him. You wait and see. These guys are magicians.

I got in terrible trouble over How The Dead Live, or at least a situation I took seriously. I named one of these aboriginal wizards in the book and ran it past a very old friend who's lived in the Northern Territories for decades. He said no, you can't do this, it's got back to him. We had to pulp an edition in Australia and I had to pay compensation.

Read more Will Self in the May 2008 issue of The Word.