HONEYCOMB

Fairytale With Rude Pork

This is an undeniably epic and impressive work

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432 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook

Author Joanne M Harris

Publisher Gollancz

Once, there was an author who started to write stories on social media. She tweeted her tales out, piece by piece, until she had enough for a book, and engaged the services of an illustrator of some fame to bring her characters to beautiful visual life. Finally, the book was ready and the writer called it Honeycomb.

Okay, we’ll stop trying to be cute now. Joanne M Harris’s latest novel is constructed from 100 short (sometimes very short) stories in the fairy tale tradition. Roughly speaking, this is the saga of the Lacewing King – a cold, capricious being, prone to playing tricks, who may have found his match in the wicked Spider Queen. But it’s also about the myriad inhabitants of the Nine Worlds – human, insect and animal – and how their brief lives intersect with the Silken Folk, for better and worse.

Because of its origins as an online project, Harris’s prose is pared back and straightforward. Full of wit, magic, romance and horror, these feel like stories to be read aloud. It’s suitable for readers of all ages, but make no mistake, many of the tales here are as pitch black as anything by the Brothers Grimm or Harris’s peer Neil Gaiman, so be warned.

With 100 stories, it’s perhaps inevitable that not all of them are good, and the sporadic attempts at satire sometimes fall flat. “The Troublesome Piglet”, for example, is a yarn about a loudmouthed farm animal always oinking on disingenuously about freedom of speech. Its point about our grifting commentariat is a valid one, but it may as well have ended with “And the name of that pig… was Laurence Fox!”

Still, this is an undeniably epic and impressive work, rich with imagination and a love of storytelling, while Charles Vess’s illustrations are every bit as elegant and enchanting as you’d expect. Gripes aside, Honeycomb is the bee’s knees. Will Salmon

Joanne Harris has put together a guide for anyone planning to tackle the book in a reading group: bit.ly/honeyreading.