It may sound trite, but I can't help it: there is something truly enigmatic about the man sitting opposite me. I'm in a small cafe at the London Bridge end of Southwark Cathedral on a nasty, humid summer morning. Loud disco parping from a speaker overhead is competing with the chimes from the steeple nearby, giving me a bizarre schizophrenic feeling. The fact that the person I've come to interview is effectively two people is not helping. My companion is a theologian and philosopher, but I'm never going to meet him. The individual I've come to interview goes by the nom de plume David Madsen, and his work is generally described with florid terms such as 'romp', 'camp', 'decadent' and 'disturbing', terms, one feels, that probably do not crop up often in his other line of work. He's sitting opposite me with an engaging smile. I'm a bit frightened.

David Madsen is the author of three novels: Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf, Confessions of a Flesh-Eater and A Box of Dreams, all published by Dedalus, purveyors of exquisitely decadent books. To give an idea of his oeuvre, at the outset of Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf Peppe, a diminutive Papal chamberlain, reads Saint Augustine to Pope Leo X whilst an apothecary applies an unguent, 'apparently concocted from virgin's piss,' to the Pontiff's rear end. From such an auspicious opening trails a tale of secret Gnostic sects, public burnings and young Peppe's love for a beautiful girl, whose death at the hands of the Inquisition must be avenged. In Madsen's second novel Confessions of a Flesh-Eater, an imprisoned culinary genius confides the secrets of his fleshy alchemy, recalling a culinary crusade against his estranged father, nouvelle cuisine and bilious restaurant critics.

Alongside expounding his philosophy of 'absorptionism' - a notion that flesh becomes rarefied into spirit via the chef's skill and the alimentary canal - Orlando Crispe celebrates his past triumphs, such as 'Manzo Gordiano dei Piaceri del Dolore', containing '1 3/4 prime flesh from one who has expired of pain's pleasure, cut into 8 large chunks.' In his third novel A Box of Dreams, Madsen portrays an amnesiac, 'Hendryk', who is lost on a terrifying journey into his own unconscious. Accompanied by 'the other' Dr. Freud, and a sadistic ticket inspector called Malkowitz, he is drawn inexorably to the castle of Count Wilhelm, where he is forced to give a lecture on the art of yodelling, and is in turn humiliated and encouraged by the Count's sexually voracious daughter Adelma. What of the mind behind these strange tales? What of the agenda behind them?

I put it to Madsen that his novels revolve around somewhat arcane ideas - Gnosticism, Psychoanalysis, the transubstantiation of flesh - and I ask him about his practice of composition; whether he prioritises a grand, overarching theme, or whether this is secondary to the narrative.

'Yes, I do generally. I tend to write in a very unstructured way. I've often been ticked off for it. I don't sit down and plan everything chapter by chapter, but I do have some ideas in my head. Gnostic Dwarf almost wrote itself. The second one was more difficult, but then the third, Box of Dreams, again just popped into my head. Gnosticism and the Papacy of the Renaissance; food and synaesthesia. The third one was dreams. I live with the ideas for some time and mull them around, and then start to write. I can generally tell when something is going to be easy or hard by the first few lines that come out.'

For David Madsen's novels tend to start with a bang. Papal bums aside, Confessions of a Flesh-Eater opens with Crispe describing the insertion of a courgette into the 'creamy, quivering anus' of a hated restaurant critic, whilst in A Box of Dreams, the forgetful hero is subjected to a most indecent assault by a masculine presence in a darkened train carriage. Such Rabelaisian goings-on ought not to distract the reader from the fact that Madsen's novels also have a strong didactic element, ranging over subjects as diverse as Renaissance art, the Reformation and Jungian psychoanalysis.

In many ways his novels constitute an attempt to bring the high and the low together. 'Perhaps not so much low and high,' he suggests, 'but certainly dualities, spirit and flesh, all kinds of things.' Interestingly, he feels this is very much a part of his own character: 'Obviously you can't write something without putting a lot of oneself into it, but I didn't realise until after Gnostic Dwarf was published, when I went back and read it two years later, at how much of that dwarf was in me.'

The author has made it a condition of our meeting in person that I do not attempt to compromise his anonymity. I don't, hence, want to pry. However, I find Madsen's background in theology and philosophy fascinating; does his academic life provide him with the materials for these books? Is he, like Rabelais, the studious scholar by day and the bawdy wit at night, gaining catharsis by letting it all hang out after a hard day's study?

'I suppose so. I taught theology and philosophy at university level for some time. In a way it's a little bit schizophrenic because when I sit down to write it's very solitary. I move in a very different world from the one that other people see me moving in. Which is why I don't write under my own name. It's very cathartic, and there's a lot of me in it, but it's just a different me in a different world. The people who know me as David Madsen are quite different from the people who know me as, (he pauses...) somebody else. I don't really want those two worlds to meet.'

Evidently a rather unconventional scholar, Madsen turns an iconoclastic literary eye over many accepted areas of learning. In Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf, he punctures the saccharine portrayal of Renaissance Italy so commonly found in today's media. Instead of the accepted version of Leo X, the grand Medici Pope - patron of art and learning, we get a myopic, lascivious, overgrown baby, whose equal predilection for art and arse are widely known and accepted. I ask Madsen if he would agree that he uses fiction as a means to destabilise the orthodox versions of history?

'It's a good question. I would never write something that said the Battle of Hastings took place in 1069, because that would just be foolish. But I might perhaps write something which put a very different slant on William the Conqueror, something that could neither be proved or disproved. Not altering history as such, but fictionalising it, because there's no such thing as uninterpreted history anyway.' What this means, of course, is that if you say that Battle of Hastings defined 1066, all you're really saying is that you feel the battle was more important than anything else that happened that year. Already you are interpreting history, giving it a slant.'

Nevertheless, Madsen repeatedly emphasises the importance of maintaining the distinction between this kind of 're-reading' and outright fabrication:
'Peppe didn't exist, but, for instance, the banquet that Peppe and Leo attend at the Strozzi residence certainly did occur.'

The scene Madsen refers to takes place when Peppe accompanies Leo on a bender of mind-blowing proportions. Lorenzo Strozzi, a member of one of
Rome's great banking families, puts on a banquet to which various senior members of the Roman clergy are invited. At its culmination, the guests set about a huge dessert with only their tongues. Before long their eager delvings uncover a female form writhing in a honey-and-grappa flavoured ecstasy. Madsen assumes a studious, self-critical tone: 'I'm quite sure the dishes that were served weren't quite like I described,' he brightens, 'but Leo certainly did suffer from a fistula.'

It is interesting to note that whilst Madsen feels justified in elaborating some of the more outré byways of history, he is adamantly opposed to the increasing trend whereby 'monsters' of the past are redeemed by a variety of postmodern whims. 'One of my betes noires is the Marquis de Sade. I think that all this crap about him being this superman, this model for a morality-less age, beyond belief in the Nietzschean sense, is an absolute load of old bollocks. He was a perverted bastard that hurt people for his own pleasure. Full stop.'� Madsen recalls with some bitterness being subjected to Philip Kaufman's glossy bodice-ripper, Quills, on a transatlantic flight: 'It's a dreadful film', he rails, 'and I was so annoyed.

Why are they bothering even to present this man as a human being - someone who elicits sympathy in the end, because the prison cuts his tongue out so that he can't speak his stories. It's not historically accurate. I don't have that sympathy, I don't see the point of not telling the truth.'

It's interesting, given Madsen's chosen anonymity, that the memoir form plays such an important part in his writing. His first two novels are the fictional autobiographies of characters who clearly place a slant on the way they narrate themselves. Peppe's avowed allegiance to the Gnostic doctrine of denial of the flesh - achieved either by complete abstinence or indulgence to show contempt - often comes unstuck in the presence of his beloved Laura. As Madsen puts it, 'Of the two, Peppe really prefers to indulge to show his contempt.' He laughs, 'I suppose we all would.' If Peppe's deceptive self-narration comes across as understandable, perhaps even rather charming, that of Orlando Crispe, the narrator of Confessions of a Flesh-Eater, is undeniably sinister. Crispe, an Oedipal figure who has an unhealthy obsession for his deceased mother, decocts his life experiences into a strange philosophy whereby flesh absorbs flesh into ever higher states of existence, a transmutation that as culinary genius he presides over like a magus.

Contrary to his feelings for the dwarf, Madsen maintains a cautious distance from his second creation: 'Orlando Crispe was more a case of presenting this character in an 'I' form in which there was very little of me. I mean I actually had letters from people saying 'have you tried that?'� It's absurd. I don't want to say that anyone who's bought one of my books is stupid - I'm grateful that they have - but it is stupid to write a letter asking me if I've ever cut people up and eaten them. Of course I haven't.'

Sitting more comfortably now, I listen as Madsen explains the background to Crispe's unusual metaphysic: 'At the time I'd been reading - or having to read - Heidegger, who is totally incomprehensible. The idea of absorptionism - which is not very complex at all - is a pastiche of Heidegger, who if you follow him, is completely absurd and ends up swallowing his own tail.' Madsen's take on Heidegger's concept of a 'totality of Being' is coupled with the notion of the body - specifically flesh - being for Crispe the locus for existential struggle. He chooses a bovine metaphor to illustrate the idea of the body being like a membrane strung between the poles of existence: 'An Irish friend whose family own a farm in County Sligo was telling me about how they'd take the cows to be slaughtered. The cows start panicking two miles before the abattoir. So they're already in a state of terror because they can sense where they're going. And I thought that that terror must be somehow already in them, must be passed on somehow.'

Madsen's most recent novel, A Box of Dreams, turns away from the fleshly regions of existence, and enters the realm of the unconscious. Its amnesiac narrator Hendryk awakes to find himself in a train carriage plunged into darkness. He has an unknown companion with whom he discusses pot-of-scalding-tea-over-the-testicles method of achieving satori, practised by Zen master Hui Po. Hendryk is sexually attacked and is shocked to discover, as the lights come on, that his molester appears to be an elderly gentleman called Sigmund Freud. A strange journey ensues, and Hendryk - clad incongruously in a dress - is drawn inexorably into the environs of Schloss Flüchstein and the clutches of Adelma, the Count's sexually voracious daughter. The book suggests the influence of Carl Jung's thinking, particularly the idea of the mid-life-crisis prompting something like a journey into the Id. 'As it happens, A Box of Dreams was started, and finished fairly quickly, at a time when I was entering analysis. In fact I trained and qualified as an analyst myself, though it's a very odd thing to say.'

Being concurrent with his own analysis, it is unsurprising that the book is packed with psychoanalytic ideas. Hendryk's journey is less obviously through space as it is through different levels of dream. Archetypes and stock images abound; a father shaking his fist aloft in a fit of phallic authority; Hendryk's dreamtime meeting with the long dead Jung; even the notion of waking into dreams. It is as though he is being drawn into the centre of his own psyche. The narrative revolves eternally like a snake biting its tail, on which Madsen reflects for a moment: 'The idea of turning from the last page back to the first, as James Joyce does in Finnegan's Wake, was for me a technical device that seemed to emphasise the fact that this character was stuck in a circle. An idea I found very disturbing.'

Madsen's analysis, it seems, has also had an impact upon the way he writes stories. When we discuss character development, he asserts that this module on the creative writing course is not for him: 'I find I don't need that, because they just emerge. They also tend to do things which I hadn't planned for them to do.' Agreeing that this does sound a bit odd, Madsen sketches the idea out in Jungian terms: 'It's like a kind of active imagination. Characters or scenes or images are just allowed to be themselves. Of course they are sources within the oneself, but in some way they do also take on a life of their own. You're writing away and suddenly somebody says something -and though it's you typing it - it's coming out of some part of you that you're not aware of. You think 'hang on, I don't want you to go there,' but they do go there , because you just go with the flow.'

As we draw to the end of our conversation, it strikes me that much of what we've spoken about during the past hour - Madsen's anonymity, the always-partial narrative of the memoir, Orlando Crispe's meat philosophy - has coalesced around the essential unknowness, or otherness, that resides at the heart of the individual. Peppe's idealisation of spirit over the body, Crispe's desire to transcend the fleshy carapace with his culinary skill: both are linked to this yawning chasm at our centre. A Box of Dreams perhaps makes the point most clearly (and perhaps most appositely, as it is rendered as a dream). At the centre of the novel, Hendryk confronts an uncanny figure, the destination of his journey hidden in the most deeply nested box:
'It's him. Not quite a doppelganger - a dream self. When I think about it now, it's quite awful to think of being stuck in this circle, because he'll never get out.'

This apt metaphor for existence - the strange fact that you never quite know who you are - threatens to bring gloom upon the conclusion of our meeting. I'm not looking forward to the tackling the chaos of South London with that thought in my mind. Then Madsen smiles and says something which is either utterly simple or utterly profound: 'Well, not unless I write a sequel.'

sean@spoiledink.com

David Madsen is currently at work on two new novels. He has also collaborated on a film script for 'Confessions of a Flesh-Eater', and the film is in preparation.

Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf, Confessions of a Flesh-Eater and A Box of Dreams are all published by Dedalus. David Madsen is also author of a cookery title: Orlando Crispe's Flesh-Eater's Cookbook, which is very strange indeed.

Want to comment on this Author Interviews? Sign up to Edit Red and you will be able to comment on Author Interviews and get access to: Upload your own stories and poems, get readers and their feedback, promote your work...