Miss Benson’s Beetle
A spinster teacher in her mid-forties in a girls’ school in ration-hit, grey-toned, austerity England in 1950, Miss Margery Benson walks out of her unfulfilling career one day on a whim, and decides to do something which has fascinated her since she was a 10-year-old girl back in 1914. On that fateful day, her father, Reverend Tobias Benson, showed the young Margery a picture of the legendary golden beetle of New Caledonia – reportedly seen but never captured. Just after this revelation, the family learns that all four of her elder brothers have been killed at Mons, and her father immediately shoots himself. Beetles are the solitary Margery’s only real passion in life, and after casting off her despised teaching job, Margery decides to finally travel to New Caledonia to look for this mythical insect. She is accompanied by the flighty Enid Pretty as her wholly unqualified assistant – the polar opposite to Margery, who has a fair number of secrets herself. Margery also has a stalker, one Mundic, who suffers from his harsh experiences as a POW in Burma during the Second World War and decides to secretly accompany Margery all the way across the world, even though she rejected his offer to assist back in London.
While all this may seem highly fantastical as a plot, the tale does indeed have the flavour and narrative style of a tongue-in-cheek humorous fairy tale. It is an easy, engaging read that both recreates the dullness of austerity England and the snobbery of colonial life. There is a parallel here to Rachel Joyce’s successful novel The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, which like Margery, saw the main character also stroll out of his dull domestic routine without premeditation and learned lessons, narrated in a twee homespun philosophy about life, friendship and loneliness. This is an entertaining and easy-to-read novel, which perhaps did not really need to be all of 400 pages long.
