Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce: book review

Miss Benson’s Beetle (2020) is set in New Caledonia in 1950.

Margery Benson is ten years old in 1914 in England when she falls in love with beetles, especially one her father mentions, that might exist: the Golden Beetle of New Caledonia. French New Caledonia is an island archipelago in the South Pacific.

At the age of 46 in 1950, Margery seeks funding from the Royal Entomology Society in London for an expedition to Fench New Caledonia to find the Golden Beetle. Both the Foreign Office and the Royal Entomology Society advise Margery against the expedition.

With her own meagre amount of money, but lots of enthusiasm, Margery takes a ship to New Caledonia, via Australia, with her young assistant Enid Pretty.

First the pair need to find the location of the tiny beetle. It lives in a small, white orchid. To impress the Royal Entomology Society, she needs to find three pairs of specimens, dead and undamaged, ‘correctly pinned’ with detailed drawings and notes.

In her pretty pink suit, Enid is not who she says she is. And who is Mundic, the man following them? And why is Mrs Pope, the British consul’s wife in New Caledonia, suspicious of Margery Benson?

This is a light, entertaining book, not so much about the scientific discovery of a rare beetle, but by the unlikely, strange friendship of two women keen to take an adventure where not many have gone before.

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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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