Margery Benson has had it. A heartbreak ruined her great passion in life, studying beetles, and for the last decade she’s wasted away teaching a subject she’s not interested in to children who are even less interested in it. After a particularly rough episode at work, she’s decided to throw caution to the wind and chase her dreams again. She has nothing to lose, after all, except a life in which she’s quite unhappy. When she was a little girl and still had hopes and aspirations, she fell in love with beetles, particularly one in her father’s book that was supposedly just a rumor — a golden, soft-winged beetle. Now, there’s nothing stopping her from searching for it. Globe-hopping isn’t the sort of thing one does alone, though: she’ll need an assistant. A smart, resourceful assistant, someone who knows French and doesn’t mind roughing it a bit. Instead, Margery gets……Enid Pretty, a flirtatious chatterbox who arrives with loads of luggage that includes a fur coat – for a journey to the tropics. Miss Benson’s Beetle is an interesting novel about vocation and friendship. In this it’s reminiscent of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Frye, — with an older protagonist taking on a physically demanding journey, their self-doubt and physical limitations overriden by a powerful sense of The Quest. To this Joyce adds an unlikely but powerful friendship that’s forged by trials faced together, and a completely new aspect — malice, in the form of a mentally distressed former prisoner of war who is obsessed with them and is talking them down, intent on “leading the expedition” himself. There’s also Enid herself, who has a past she’s definitely being misleading about. I enjoyed this, though not nearly to the same degree as The Music Shop and Harold Frye. It’s chiefly memorable for the setting (New Caledonia) and the two main characters: Enid is delightfully wacky, and Margery an inspiration. Joyce does not disappoint!

Quote:

“You’re deep in this. You’re in it up to your eyebrows. And you don’t seem to realize. It isn’t like me. Your vocation is not your friend. It’s not a consolation for someone you lost once, or even a way of passing the time. It doesn’t care whether you’re happy or sad. You must not betray it, Marge.”

“Enid? Opening my top will not work. And neither will flashing my legs. He’s a woman.”
“Wait. The policeman is a woman? How can that be?”
“I don’t know. But it’s a woman.”
“No. I have never seen a policewoman. When did that happen? They don’t have women policemen in New Caledonia.”
“Well, maybe on the east coast they do. Or maybe she’s the policeman’s wife and the policeman is sick today so she’s doing the rounds on his behalf. I don’t know. We have no time to debate this fascinating subject. She’s coming!”

“But no matter how awful life was, I would never want to give up. I would always want to keep living. Just waiting for that moment when it might get better. You need to remember nthat, Marge. You must never give up again.” She touched her belly. “We are not the things that happened to us. We can be what we like.”