One of my favourite treats over the last couple of years has been reading the novellas that Joanne has been quietly forming that have rewritten the Child Ballads for a modern audience. They have been a wonderful marriage of lyrical prose and subtle yet atmospheric illustration, in little packages that have been able to be read in one sitting – and then reread.
Honeycomb follows a similar pattern, but of all of Joanne’s work of this type to date it is bigger, more complex and more ambitious. It works wonderfully well.
From the publisher: “Long ago and far away,
Far away and long ago,
The World was honeycomb, we know,
The Worlds were honeycomb.
The beauty of stories is that you never know where they will take you. Full of dreams and nightmares, Honeycomb is an entrancing mosaic novel of original fairy tales from bestselling author Joanne M. Harris and legendary artist Charles Vess in a collaboration that’s been years in the making. Dark, gripping, and brilliantly imaginative, these magical tales will soon have you in their thrall.
Each original tale is a small piece of the larger picture – a clue or a message, a theme, or a warning – interwoven with the tale of the Lacewing King as he travels the Worlds and encounters a multitude of characters: a toymaker who wants to create the perfect wife; a princess whose heart is won by words, not actions; a tiny dog whose confidence far outweighs his size; and the vengeful Spider Queen, and deadly Harlequin . . .”
Anyone who has been brought up on Fairy stories, whether Hans Christian Andersen or the Grimm Brothers (child and adult versions), the various collections of Victorian and Edwardian Fairy Stories accumulated by Andrew Lang (The Yellow Book of Fairy Stories, The Blue Book of Fairy Stories… you get the idea) or the more modern prose of Neil Gaiman and Naomi Novik will know what this is about. It is a set of collected short stories – 100 in all – in two books, that read well both individually or, as you progress through the book, cleverly intertwine to tell a tale that is greater than the sum of its parts.
There are Fairies, Elves, Kings, Queens, Princes and Princesses, bees and moths, creatures that will do you harm as well as guide your hand. The intertwined tales tell of the Lacewing King, the last King of the Silken folk, from his birth to his ascendance of power whilst travelling between worlds. But along the way there are stories to make you laugh, creatures that will scare you, stories of love, hate and revenge. Being the son of the Queen of Bees has its usefulness as well.
“There are many doors between the worlds of the Faërie and the Folk. Some look like doors; or windows; or books. Some are in Dream; others, in Death. And some simply wait for one person—the right person—to find them and to pass through.
So it was with the Lacewing King. Banished by the Spider Queen, he was dragged through the space between the Worlds into a different place and time; into a different ocean. He found himself drifting there, alone; under strange stars, with no land in sight; and no sign of his ship, his crew, the Spider Queen, or the Barefoot Princess. Exhausted from his long ordeal, lost and at the mercy of the waves, he drifted in the darkness, watching the river of stars above and the glimmer of phosphorescence below, thinking about the Barefoot Princess, and what might have befallen her.
Beneath him, shoals of angel fish swam through arches of coral. Great whales passed like shadows; Moon Jellyfish rose and fell in the depths. For a moment the Moon Queen herself glanced up from her midnight cradle, and saw the man floating far above her. Her tentacles had grown so long that they almost reached the surface, drifting like a bridal veil, and for a second they brushed the soles of the feet of the Lacewing King, and he looked down and saw her.”
As you can see from the above example, the stories are of an old, almost-poetic style, with layers of depth and a lyrical vocabulary that is deliberately not modern, yet gives the stories a timeless feel. It feels like every word has been chosen carefully, with precision. They could be from the Grimm brothers or Lang’s collections as much as they are from a modern writer.
It also helps that these stories are illustrated in the typical Art Deco style of multi-award-winning artist Charles Vess, who specialises in the drawings of myths and legends – readers will know his work perhaps on Neil Gaiman’s Stardust, or most recently on the Earthsea omnibus volume by Ursula K LeGuin. Like the illustrations of the Lang books before him (mainly illustrated then by Henry Justice Ford) Vess’s work, in the style of Golden Age artist Arthur Rackham, transcends all ages and also adds to the timeless feel of the book. This is a book that feels like it would make an ideal gift, as Lang’s books did back in his time.
The prose of Honeycomb is so rich and dense that it is not to be gobbled up lightly. It is instead one that you will want to savour. I found that reading one or two stories a day worked best for me (perhaps at bedtime!), though I did often read more than I had planned and read many stories more than once as I went. As the book progressed, I found myself going back to earlier stories to “spot the connections”. It would be wrong of me to spoil those for readers, but suffice it to say that the links are clever, some are subtle, others less so, and together they create a wonderful tapestry of tales. If you have read those earlier novellas I mentioned, there are creatures and places you have read about before, which adds to the experience. I should also say that many of these stories are deliciously dark – not particularly sexual, but definitely not for children.
Honeycomb is a book that you need to take time with, but will pay back richly if you do. It mixes myth and magic, nature and spirit to form an intelligent and multi-layered prose poem that both celebrates Fairy stories and brings the style of the Fairy tales of old to a modern-day audience. It is one to dip into, to read and reread, and I rather suspect would be excellent read out aloud.
For me it is Joanne’s best work to date – clearly a labour of love by both the author and the artist, and one to be loved and admired for its ambition, its lush poetic prose and most of all, its heart.
Honeycomb by Joanne M. Harris
Illustrations by Charles Vess
Published by Gollancz, June 2021
ISBN: 978 147 3213 999
420 pages
Review by Mark Yon
This sounds wonderful, Mark. I’m glad you brought it to our attention. (Of course, that assumes others are as unfamiliar with Harris’ work as I am, so …)
Thanks Randy. You can read this without having read any of Joanne’s other work. Outside the genre, Joanne is perhaps best known for her novel Chocolat which was made into a movie in 2000 starring Juliette Binoche, Judi Dench and Johnny Depp.