Miss Benson's Beetle
and other 2023 favorites
I read so many books I love that it’s always hard (often impossible) to pick a favorite for any given year. This year it was easy, though. Rachel Joyce’s Miss Benson’s Beetle is my hands-down favorite of 2023. It’s the kind of book I’d write myself if only I could figure out how.
The book is variation on what I think of as British spinster novels, stories of proper, unassuming but also somehow fierce aging spinsters told in in such hilariously wry, ironic voices and rendered in such fabulously quirky detail that their small, cramped lives seem exotic.
It begins, “When Margery was ten, she fell in love with a beetle.”
She and her father are looking through a book called Incredible Creatures. A squirrel with wings, a man with a mermaid tail, a lion-tailed monkey.
“Are they real?” she asks.
He says, “There are people who believe they exist, but they haven’t caught them yet so they can’t prove it.”
Margery is confused. “Until that moment, she’d assumed everything in the world was already found. It had never occurred to her that things might happen in reverse. That you could see a picture of something in a book—that you could as good as imagine it—and then go off and look.”
She asks her father if he thinks they’re real.
He nods and tells her, “I have begun to feel comforted by the thought of all we do not know, which is nearly everything.”
When he turns the page again, there is the golden beetle of New Caledonia. At first it seems like an ordinary beetle to Margery, but the next page shows it magnified—and she is transfixed. Touching the image, she goes hot and cold. Her future opens.
She will be the one to find it.
Then the doorbell rings. When her father returns after speaking with the caller, it’s as if Marjorie has become invisible. He seems lost. He riffles through papers on his desk, picks up a pen but just stares at it, tears falling.
“All of them?” he says to nobody. “What? All?”
Then steps through the French windows and shoots himself.
I know. You’re thinking, you mentioned hilarity earlier?
But as Hemingway said, “Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.”
He might not be a fan of Miss Benson’s Beetle but I’m guessing he’d respect the truth of Rachel Joyce’s telling.
What I love about this book and the best of the British spinster novels is that they don’t settle for amusing. They also showcase the courage and integrity of these lonely women doggedly doing their best in a world determined to render them invisible.
That said, parts of Miss Benson’s Beetle are truly hilarious.
For example, Margery’s first sight of her last-choice assistant, Enid Pretty, when they are about to embark on the journey. “...a short, thin woman with hair like bright yellow candy floss...tottered across the concourse, her luggage so heavy she could only wave at Margery with her foot. Her hair was a stiff puff with the perky hat pinned on top: about as useful in terms of sun protection as a beer mat on her head. She wore a bright pink two-piece travel suit that accentuated her round bust and hips, tiny sandals with a pom-pom at the tow, and her nails were painted like juicy sweets.”
Plus, she insists on calling Margery “Marge.” Which delighted me every single time I read it. Not to mention the fact that Enid Pretty is the best name ever.
Enid is preposterously unprepared for an expedition and the chaos and confusion she causes provide much of the book’s humor; a secret that chases her through the book escalates its tension.
And there’s shellshocked Mr. Mundic, a former POW, who’s convinced he’s destined to be Marjorie’s assistant even though she’d declined to offer him the job.
The stories of what brought Enid and Mr. Mundic to the moment Miss Benson’s Beetle begins are threaded through the novel, along with the story of Margery’s life.
The journey from London to Poum, the northernmost point on New Caledonia—complicated by the fact that Enid must go to, well, extremes because she doesn’t have a passport and Margery’s passport picture includes half of the head of a woman who peeked into the photo booth at the moment the photo was taken—takes them by ship (Margery seasick most of the way) to Brisbane, where Enid disappears for a bit, reappearing just in time for the next leg with a dog named Mr. Rawlings. A water plane takes them to New Caledonia, where waiting for Margery’s lost luggage, they find themselves amongst a group of British wives led by the officious Mrs. Pope and her assistant Dolly, who are determined to create a bit England in this godforsaken place.
The expedition itself. Having made their way to Poum, Margery and Enid rent a hut a little way from town to use as the base for exploration. Every Monday, week after week, they go up the mountain, searching for the golden beetle, and return on Friday. Margery organizes the specimens she’s brought back; Enid drives into Poum for supplies.
Oh, I forgot. Enid stole the Jeep she’s driving.
I’ll leave it there except to say that Margery and Enid are intrepid. That Mr. Mundic eventually enters the picture, creating havoc.
And Joyce’s descriptions of the island are absolutely breathtaking. (I’m dying to know if she actually went there.)
If I read Miss Benson’s Beetle over and over and over, could I learn by osmosis to write a good British spinster novel, too?
Sigh.
I’ll close out this reading year with MANY THANKS FOR READING BOOK PILGRIM, BEST WISHES FOR A NEW YEAR FULL OF WONDERFUL BOOKS and a few other 2023 favorites (in no particular order):
Lessons in Chemistry, by Bonnie Gavin
Hello Beautiful, Ann Napolitano
Thunderclap: a Memoir of Sudden Life and Death, Laura Cumming
To Build a Boat, Elaine Feeney
It really is.
Thanks for reading it!
Happy 2024!