Joanne M Harris: ‘Honeycomb’
“There is a story the bees used to tell…”
Browsing the shelves of my local library earlier this year, the sub-title embossed on the cover of Joanne Harris’ ‘Honeycomb’ caught my eye. Eh up, I thought, bees telling stories seems remarkably similar to the strap line of my wasp cycle:
“It is a little known fact that wasps tell each other stories.”
Thankfully, it turned out the similarities were minor and complementary. Joanne and I may have been at work in the same kitchen, but we were serving a different menu, possibly to a different clientele. The differences were revealing.
(Setting aside, talent and accomplishments and all-round generosity; I’m talking about purpose and genre.)
If I recall correctly, the bees in ‘Honeycomb’ don’t recount any stories. They are the ancient communicators, the neurotransmitters of the imagination; they carry the stories, allude to them, but other characters narrate them, where the act is dramatized, if not, there is a more orthodox authorial arrangement. The line functions instead as a traditional story starter like ‘once upon a time,’ ‘Long, long ago,’ and ‘there was or there was not’ and so on. It acts as an authorisation—trust this source—and it seems to have been Joanne’s way into her multi-layered narrative landscape.
“There is a story the bees used to tell, which makes it hard to disbelieve.”
These are faerie tales. The silken folk as she calls them, with kings and queens, ancient grudges and rivalries, and misbegotten interventions with the ordinary world. Stealthily, she weaves a saga that draws the many threads together, developing a cosmology, a theory of the world(s) and the imagination. It’s rich and sweet—honeyed!—but rarely over-egged. It was delightful yet not to my taste.
FABLE, FOLK TALE, AND FANTASY
For me, folk tales are not mythologies. They may feature the same tropes—kings, queens, step-mothers, forests, magical transormation—but these do not constitute a coherent world and they don’t gain anything by having such a world constructed around them. But though a folk tale may stand alone on its merits, there is no space for it in modern publishing. It has been orphaned. And infantilized. Subsumed as childrens’ literature in the nineteenth century and then developed as ‘fantasy’ through the twentieth. But fantasy’s attractions, its essential pleasures, are world-building and narrative weave. ‘Honeycomb’ spins fantasy from the folk tale.
Unlike ‘Honeycomb,’ the wasps in my humble wasp project do tell stories. They tell them to each other and, like the characters in the Panchatantra, they use them to make a point. It could be the root of the work was more fable than folk tale, more philosophical than marvellous, though I did find the rudimentary features of a mythology emerging in the form of an anti-hero, a trickster figure, the Angry Wasp. The pull of this character was difficult to ignore and his adventures expressed the core moral problems of duty and self-interest.
This is neither childrens’ literature nor fantasy. It sits on the rutted track beyond these twin citadels, willfully refusing shelter. The world the wasps inhabit is quite ordinary and familiar, apart from their ability to discourse like humans, and their tales are no more intended for children than Aesops’ fables, or Voltaire’s Candide.
So far, only one of these tales has been published, as a test of the process, available here, with illustrations by my sister.
