“I should like,” said Honey dreamily, “to have a floor set out in chequers and to play chess with men and women. I would stand on a chair and call my moves from a megaphone and they would click their heels and march forward. The knights on real horses, the royal couple with gold crowns on their heads.”
That Honeybuzzard, the title character of Angela Carter’s first novel, imagines himself partaking of Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts’ favorite pastime, is surely no accident. Honeybuzzard is a wild ride through a grotesque wonderland where the sordid and mundane glow with a menacing otherworldliness. It’s a claustrophobic story set in squalid pubs, lightless (and loveless) bedrooms, abandoned Edwardian homes, and a desiccated junk shop in a small English city. The gray dullness of its setting is illuminated by Honeybuzzard, one of the junk shop’s proprietors, who has a penchant for wigs, fake noses, straw boaters, Victoriana, and cruelty. Morris, Honey’s partner in the junk shop (and much else), is equally repelled and attracted by Honeybuzzard’s antics, and morally tormented by his own complicity in the crime at the novel’s heart.
That crime is the vicious maiming of Ghislaine, a girl with whom Morris and Honeybuzzard (and apparently most of the men in the city) had an affair. Though Morris claims that Ghislaine was found naked at the cemetery gates after a brutal attack by unknown teenagers, he’s certain that it was Honeybuzzard who cut the scar that “went all the way down her face, from the corner of her left eyebrow, down, down, down, past nose and mouth and chin until it disappeared below the collar of her shirt.” At the book’s opening Ghislaine has returned from the hospital, and stalks like a spectral revenant through the city, leaving horror and grief in her wake. She circles Honeybuzzard, who is singularly unaffected by her haunting, and in the end exacts a terrible and bizarre revenge on him and on herself.
Angela Carter is probably best known for her short stories, which blend fair tales, myths, and fantasy with potent psychosexual nightmares. Though a little longer than a novella, Honeybuzzard is of a piece with Carter’s stories: concise, harrowing, and poetic. The dust jacket flap on the 1966 U.S. edition compares her to Muriel Spark, and there is something of The Driver’s Seat in the perversity and unhinged self-destructiveness of Ghislaine. But there’s always a glimmer of moral balance lurking inside Spark’s world, which gives her novels a certain distant quality; Carter’s world has an abyss at its center, an all-consuming lust and hunger, which makes Honeybuzzard equally horrific and enthralling.
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