The Beetle by Richard Marsh: book review

The Beetle (1897, this edition 2004) is set in London, England, in the late 19^thcentury over a period of three days. It was published in the same year as Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula and was initially more popular. Richard Marsh is the pseudonym of English author Richard Bernard Heldmann (1857-1915).

The novel has four narrators: unemployed Robert Holt, chemical warfare inventor Sydney Atherton, Marjorie Lindon, and detective Augustus Champnell.

Robert Holt arrives in London in the rain, looking for an inn. He slips into the window of an abandoned house. Frightened by a beetle in the dark, he was about to flee when a person stops him: ‘after an interval of time, I did see something; and what I did see I had rather have left unseen.’

The beetle has powers of hypnosis and shape-shifting in this gothic horror crime thriller – shape-shifting by morphing into animals and people – both male and female.

The beetle is looking for the politician Paul Lessingham, a member of the House of Commons. The beetle wants Robert to steal something in order to blackmail the politician.

Three men – Paul Lessingham, Sydney Atherton, and Percy Woodville who is Sydney’s friend – are vying for the attention of Marjorie Lindon, representative of the emerging ‘new women’ who advocates female suffrage, education, and women’s and children’s rights. She openly defies her father and pays the price for it.

This is a long, convoluted tale of crime encased in themes, such as politics, shady pasts, treason, corruption, imperialism, class wars, and women’s liberation, coupled with the occult, gender shape-shifting, human sacrifice, and role reversals through hypnotism. It seems to be set in continual darkness and mystery. The beetle is depicted as large and ugly, a creature that hides in the dark, scuttling, crawling, and flying. This novel is fantastical, weird, and a strange ‘shocker’ that plays on people’s fear of the unknown – and of creepy crawling creatures.

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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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