Six years ago journalist and screenwriter Patrick Lee left South Africa for England. There, in his spare time, he began to weave together an absurdly humourous story of a displaced Englishwoman and the characters she encounters while visiting her place of birth, Port Victoria — a dorp inhabited by both strange and familiar stereotypes in a changed and changing country. In the novel, Discards (Penguin), Lee successfully captures the dialogue and archetypal mentalities of a specific time and place — not all of them comfortable. Filled with characters such as Mendi Mkhize (former freedom fighter, now magistrate), Dom Marais (wealthy marijuana farmer), Woodstock (psychotic, misogynistic Afrikaner) and Breakdown (crazy, black vagrant), Lee has created a South African novel finely tailored and rhythmically written for a niche market — South Africans.
How did you get into writing?
I was born in Pinetown in Natal and grew up there. I was always best at writing. At school, I had a poem published and was marginalised as a homosexual, poetry-writing nerd at this rugby-obsessed school. Eventually, I went into advertising as a copywriter. After that, a friend of mine and I began a surfing magazine — we were young, arrogant and stupid and tried to copy the style of Rolling Stone. After that, I came to Jo’burg and joined Style for four years. I then went freelance and began writing corporate videos and awful films.
Is the screenwriting business difficult?
You think that you’ve arrived and you haven’t. One of my scripts was optioned by Aaron Spelling and never got made. In England there are a hell of a lot of waiters writing brilliant screenplays. It’s hard and you’ve got to have something special.
Why did you leave South Africa?
My wife was offered a transfer.
What inspired you to write this novel?
Every writer aspires to write a novel some day. I was standing on a cliff in Hermanus a few years ago and I realised that my daughter’s accent is British. She sounds like a tourist. I’m not British and I don’t want to be, but she is, even thought she was born here. It’s difficult and it’s a predicament that I mined for the book. Port St Johns seemed a natural place to start and tell the stories that I hadn’t yet been able to tell.
Does it concern you that this novel may only be accessible to South Africans?
I wanted it to be accessible to us. I wrote this book for myself — if it is a microcosm, then that’s great. It’s about many lives in one place — a jigsaw.
Are there parallels in the novel between your character Alice’s and your own sense of longing for “home”?
Yes, there are definite parallels. I really don’t feel that England is home to me, but I have learned to accept it. It’s about laying a smooth path for my daughter — it’s best for her to grow up there. Writing the novel was an organic process and Alice reflects my torn feelings about living away from South Africa. I chose to make the main character a woman as I feel that women carry forward what we are and what we do.