CONFESSING A MURDER

A remarkable debut by Australian naturalist Drayson, who offers us a perverse insight into the mind of a Victorian entomologist.

In 1988, Drayson informs us in an introduction, a strange manuscript was discovered in the attic of a large old house in Holland. Narrated by an unknown author, it describes an English naturalist’s obsessive search for rare beetles—a search that ultimately led to his ruin on a tiny volcanic island in the Java Sea. Here we have that man’s (let us called him the Narrator) account. The Narrator was a solitary child who grew up in a loveless home in Shropshire in the early 19th century and found his only joy in collecting insects. This pastime was encouraged by the local parson, who helped him to classify and collect his specimens and arranged for his further studies at a boarding school where the boy became friends with a classmate named Charles Darwin. The Narrator followed Darwin to Cambridge, where the philosophy of Kant, the mathematics of Newton, and the population theories of Malthus had all combined to force a new examination of the biblical accounts of creation. Eventually, of course, this led Darwin to formulate his theory of natural selection, a theory he discussed with the Narrator but was reluctant (despite the latter's encouragement) to publish. When a bad love affair forces the Narrator to leave England, he makes a virtue of necessity by setting himself up in Australia as an exporter, then using his profits and his ships to study the flora and fauna of the remoter islands of the South Seas. In time, he becomes driven to acquire a Golden Scarab—an extremely rare species of beetle—and he is led in his search to the Five Islands, a chain of volcanic islands east of Java. There, he finds the object of his quest—at a price he had not anticipated.

An intelligent, gripping, and vivid adventure: Drayson writes in an exceptionally self-assured tone that perfectly captures the spirit of the 19th century.