Like the 1939 movie version of "The Wizard of Oz," Rachel Joyce's new novel, "Miss Benson's Beetle," starts out in black and white and then opens up into glorious Technicolor.
In 1950, World War II is over but England remains grim and gray, with food and goods still rationed and everybody ground down. "Streets were lined with broken buildings … you could go miles on the bus and not see a flower. Or blue sky."
Middle-aged schoolteacher Margery Benson is chafing at her dreary life, which feels like it's over before it has even begun. She pictures herself as "a beetle in a killing jar, dying slowly."
On the day that her students pass around a mocking cartoon depicting her as a lumpy woman with a nose like a potato and feet like planks, she has finally had enough.
She walks out of the classroom where she is teaching the loathed domestic sciences, inexplicably steals a fire extinguisher and a pair of boots from the teachers' lounge, gets on a bus, and heads off into a new life.
Many of Joyce's protagonists are middle-aged, unhappy characters, good people who are leading bland lives that hide intense psychic pain. They rashly plunge into some kind of irrational but liberating behavior — often, some sort of quest. Joyce's first novel, "The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry," found the protagonist heading out from his home in the south of England to mail a letter — and then, instead, walking the letter to its destination in the north of England.
"Miss Benson's Beetle" follows this pattern in a general way, but it feels larger than Joyce's other books — more expansive, swashbuckling, a wild adventure. It is the best so far of her novels, and the most inspiring.
As a girl, the last bright moment in Margery Benson's life was the afternoon her gentle father introduced her to a book of amazing creatures — the Loch Ness Monster, the South African quagga, the golden beetle of New Caledonia. At the sight of the beetle, "her insides gave a lurch. … It was as if Nature had taken a bit of jewelry and made an insect instead."
