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Was it a spontaneous haemorrhage? “It was spontaneous.

As Aldo says, ‘The only thing worse that being a statistic is being a statistical anomaly’. “A team of medical practitioners didn’t understand it. In 2004, while walking down a Paris street, Toltz suffered a cervical spine haemorrhage, causing a paralysis he feared might be permanent. Photograph: David Maurice Smith for the Guardian Steve Toltz: ‘I’m always had an awareness of death.’ Quicksand depicts Aldo unsuccessfully trying to surf in defiance of his paraplegia: Aldo, it transpires, is Toltz’s trauma of 11 years ago writ large on the page.

The author is tapping his own dark side? “Exactly.” His characters, otherwise, are amalgams inspired by real people he’s amazed those people don’t recognise themselves.Īldo was originally a character by another name in Toltz’s first book, removed from the story partly because literary agents rejected the original 1000-page manuscript as far too long. “In the cases of these kinds of protagonists, I’m exaggerating a part of myself as alter ego for fictional purposes,” he laughs. Toltz reveals that the faults of these megalomaniacal misanthropes lie mostly within himself. In Quicksand, failed get-rich-quick entrepreneur Aldo Benjamin employs his psychology study to “weirdly attune to a person’s insecurity and embarrassing habits and likely sources of shame”. He made it his “laborious” project to “dismantle” his son Jasper’s life. In A Fraction of the Whole, nihilistic Martin Dean would “quickly discover the thing a person was most proud of and immediately ridicule it as a way of undermining them”. “I enjoy having that buffoon-but-wise character,” he says. Tall, dark and affable, Toltz orders a tiny, full-bodied piccolo coffee at Walsh Bay on Sydney harbour, preparing to launch Quicksand at the 2015 Sydney Writers’ festival. Yet he’s also a master of interiority, an author of ideas whose intelligence arms him to take informed aim at academic and autodidact proselytisers who elevate their voracious reading on philosophy, psychology or art to a self-serving, incontrovertible set of rules for others, but personally fail to heed.