Lee Harrison launches his novel writing career with enough profanity to make your uncle ashamed, and characterisation that dances through a fast paced plot interwoven with airships and solider antics. The Bastard Wonderland has epic fantasy scale with solid industrial fantasy technologies woven in. It answers the call for the working class protagonist. It wriggled its way under the radar of man, yet continues to win readers over with its Steptoe and Son feel. It even managed to shoulder its way on to the Not the Booker Prize Longlist. This isn’t a book you can judge by its cover.
Welcome to SFFWorld, Lee. Wrecking Ball Press is a well-established press but it isn’t a genre publisher. Whose arm did you have to break to persuade them to part with tradition?
Now then. Thanks for having me. TBW did the rounds of all the major SFF publishers in the UK, earning a lot of editorial interest, but falling short of sales and marketing team approval because it doesn’t fit an existing market mould. A mate of mine had read an earlier draft then by chance started working with Wrecking Ball Press, and championed its cause. I was aware of Wrecking Ball Press, but I wouldn’t have dreamed of submitting to them just because they publish poetry and very literary stuff. But, true enough, Shane – the editor of WB Press – told me that “the bottom line is, it’s a great book, we’ll publish it.” I think it is to the book’s credit that they picked it up. I also think the Northerness, and the joy of swearing helped a lot…
The Bastard Wonderland’s just a little bit sweary. When you were originally writing it, were you tempted to wash the characters mouths out with soap and water?
It crossed my mind fleetingly, but it just felt real that this cast of characters, who are largely from a very working class background of soldiers, labourers and sailors would swear a lot. I think it just lends authenticity to the characters, and gives the dialogue a bit of thump. There’s such a thing as artful swearing – which can be used to artful, poignant and sometimes hilarious effect – and then there’s just crass effing and blinding.
Warboys and his father Bill practically leap from the page. Are your characters modelled on people from your local pub or the result of careful character development?
A bit of both. I live in Hull, descended from a fishing family, and it always seemed to me that there’s a certain cantankerous, but essentially good natured humour about my people, particularly the older generations, which at the same time as being familiar, also has a bit of vintage about it. Warboys sprang out of this almost ready made – and the more I went with it, the more humour, life and pathos came out of him and his relations hip with Bill and Nouzi. I also found a lot of inspiration in classic British comedies, such as Steptoe and Son, Porridge and Only Fools and Horses – again with that sense of a working class, hard-done-by-but-essentially-decent nature and humour. I’d like to think that, as with these comedy classics, TBW also expresses a bit of social commentary in through the struggles of Warboys and co.
The sexuality of one of the characters is bound to be challenging for some readers. Did you ever consider editing out this important aspect in order to appeal to a broader market?
I’m assuming we’re talking about Nouzi Aaranya, and not Warboys’ late night drunken visits to his long suffering missus? TBW was always going to be an adult book for various other reasons. As it happens, I’d never enjoyed writing sex scenes, until I convinced myself writing this book that there was story and character that could be expressed with them. Unlike Warboys, Nouzi was a character that didn’t pop out ready made. I really had to look for him, just as he spends a lot of time looking for himself. On the one hand, Nouzi lives in a kind of pure and amorous devotion to a female god-figure he doesn’t know – but on the other, his passions are very real, and vented in sometimes troubling power-play relationships with his male peers. Until I explored this less lofty aspect of him, there was something missing from his story. This kind of wandering sexuality isn’t a shoe-in for its own sake, but the fruition of a long struggle to develop character – and I think it all really pays off in the climax. So to speak. Besides which, most people like mucky bits.
How much of your home town’s history influenced the world building of The Bastard Wonderland?
The background themes in TBW deal with revolution, modernity and the struggle for identity, and so there’s a lot to influence a writer in this here City of Culture. As I’ve said above, the voice and mannerism of my home town was important in character development, and that in turn owes a lot to the City of Hull. It’s a massively working class city that has seen hard knocks in its time, has slogged its guts out to the fishing industry, been flattened by war, suffered massive loss in peace, and long disregard from the powers that be. Hull has a rebellion about it, a healthy disrespect for authority. This is the city that turned away Charles I and helped bring about democracy. Also, aesthetically, old photos of Hull in the hay day of its industry, the cobbles and factories and docks, and some of the surviving buildings helped formed the ‘look and feel’ of Warboys’ home town and its people – and also, being a port, it has the sense of a gateway to a wider world 
– an essential part of any decent fantasy yarn.
You also did the cover art for The Bastard Wonderland. From a creative point of view, what form do you prefer?
I go for what you might call a mixed media approach – I tend to work from pencil and/or brush and ink drawings, which I then colour and texture digitally. I like to see the handiwork in a finished piece, so I try to preserve some brushstrokes and scribbles.
The cover features a tentacular airship. If you had some equally fantastic vehicle, what would it be – and why?
I love the AS Hildegaard – but her flatulence, alcohol dependence, the constant greasy maintenance – not mention her carnivorous tendencies – would get old pretty quick. I do love train travel – there’s something wonderful about being in a cosy travelling room with the reassuring rhythm of the engines and the landscape rushing by. Perhaps a steam train that goes over water like the one in Ghibli’s Spirited Away.
Aside from the sequel are you working on anything else at the moment?
A more fantastical, probably less sweary, more YA oriented adventure about a boy going on adventure with his undead nana. I’d like it to be something different in style – a touch brighter and more giddy – the sort of thing that would suit a Miyazaki film. Of course, if Nana has too much to drink though, it might get adult again…
Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions Lee, good luck with the work in progress.
When Wrecking Ball Press published The Bastard Wonderland they opened a portal into a parallel world from their cultural office in Hull. Here’s hoping that portal remains open and they’ll publish more high quality genre fiction, starting with a follow up to The Bastard Wonderland.
The Bastard Wonderland is available direct from Wrecking Ball Press, or from Amazon. You can follow Lee on Twitter, but if you want to know about the mushy peas you’re better off reading his book!
*****
Interview by Shellie Horst – SFFWorld.com © 2017
Save
Save
