Quest for beetle a thrilling adventure

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.

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, 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.

“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.”

And so Margery decides she will sail to New Caledonia and find that beetle.

So off she goes, with a paid companion she finds through the classified ads. Enid Pretty is feisty and tough, a blond woman in highheeled boots who irritates Miss Benson by calling her “Marge.” Somewhere along the way, Enid acquires a dog, which strains their relationship even more.

At the heart of the story is the slow, unlikely friendship that builds between the two women and how that friendship enables them both to grow stronger, more capable and more self-reliant. And if this sounds hokey, well, it’s not. It’s thrilling.

The closer Margery and Enid get to their goals, the tougher the obstacles. There is violence, there are harrowing scenes.

The ending is not pat, nor fully happy. But it is hopeful. There is resilience, there is redemption, and there is beauty — great beauty. In Technicolor.