Miss Benson's Beetle: A Novel
By: Rachel Joyce / Narrated By: Juliet Stevenson
Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins
Oh good golly gosh—how hard I fell for this story. Gorgeous: purely, simply
It’s like this see: My husband still, like, reeeeeads (What IS his problem?!). Every now and again he requests that I purchase a book for him (Good Prime member that I am…). Okay, no problem. But that’s not enough for me. I ALWAYS buy him another book to go with it, something I’ve found to be amazing, just DYING to share with him.
This time? No, he hasn’t requested a book, but I’m thinking Miss Benson’s Beetle is just so jaw-droppingly gorgeous that I’m considering purchasing it to chuck at ‘im with a blessing and a cheery: You’re Welcome!
But I dunno cuz EVERY place I look, reviewers, promoters, are touting this book and making it sound like it’s just a lovely story about women and their friendships. Would my husband be up for THAAAAT?!?
See, I found it to be about soooo much more; at least that’s the way it hit me as I listened to it, and when all was said and done.
Margery is a numbed out spinster, dead end teaching job where she’s a complete nonentity at her school, a joke to her cruel students, and a nobody when she goes back to her empty and unlovely flat. One day, after a mean caricature makes its rounds amongst her pupils, she sees herself as others do: Frumpy, with the worn out shoes, her dumb hair to go with her dumb and aging self. She snaps. With one ill-considered move, she swipes a pair of boots from the teacher’s lounge and runs, leaving her job behind, and determining in an angst-ridden haze to journey to find a golden beetle in New Caledonia. There is nooooo place for her here in England, just memories and pain.
And the only person, after a few interviews, to make it through to become her assistant on the voyage is Enid Pretty, an odd and somewhat oblivious woman who teeters her way with aaaaaallll her belongings (And nary a serviceable item amongst it all) as they baaaarely make their train. It was down to the wire. And indeed, with Enid along, mucking up the works with her ever-present chaos, it’s always coming down to barely making it.
Naturally, this chaos v. order is the basis for the story’s development, and indeed it’s what reviewers seem to seize upon: Two opposites who find friendship due to their very different natures.
Oh, but there’s so very much else that goes on within the hours of this book. There is some incredibly gorgeous writing of the emptiness of a full heart that’s attached to a lost soul for both of the women. There’s also some really really gritty writing when it comes to another character who was once a POW in Burma as he navigates trying to join Margery (Called Marge by Enid, much to Margery’s dismay but ultimate joy). He has a heavy heavy-duty case of PTSD as he suffers flashbacks, hiding from “Japs” who have done so much destruction to his soul, to his psyche. He lives in pain even as his actions become more and more desperate with each stumbling block he encounters (And trust me, I do a LOT of Military History, and this is some really rough stuff).
Then too, there’s the fact that each of the characters is driven by pain, of past complete and total abandonments, of losing pregnancies, of dealing with PTSD of husbands after WWII, of trying to remember that this life, this moment right here and now might just be free of the agony that’s been pressing shoulders down for yeeeears.
And of course this audiobook has the WONderful Juliet Stevenson conveying all of this, purely and joyfully bringing each character and each of their horrors, their wonders to life. Only she can describe horror one moment to smoothly go onto the discovery that there is dawning love in the world. Brava, oh BRAVA, Ms. Stevenson. This was a New Release, and tho’ I’ve no experience with any other of author Rachel Joyce’s much-admired works, I was captivated by the (Yeh yeh yeh, I read it!) Publisher’s Summary, the cover, AND Juliet Stevenson as narrator. Can she possibly doooo a BAD audiobook? Thus far? I think not!
So here I am, mulling over possibly getting my dear print-reading husband something that’s reviewed as the most wondrous of chick-lit. I’m kinda torn, but the man has an open mind, and he might be open to a truly breathtaking work of “Women and their Friendships” so maybe?
Without Ms. Stevenson performing in her inimitable style, would the grit and terror be lost? Some of the emptiness of life which goes on to blossom then is challenged?
Dunno… But as the end had me sobbing into a tissue cuz it was just so danged lovely? Perhaps a print copy miiiiiight indeed be heading his way…!
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