Rather than go into the plot details I'd rather touch on the larger metaphors of the book in this review. Although the basic plot is chilling enough on its own (A man kidnaps a beautiful and intelligent young girl) the parts that truly disturbed me had to do more with what I believe Fowles was saying about modern culture and the rise of the middle class. Though this book is decidedly "British" in many ways, I think the issues he raises are applicable to any society where a large middle class is created in a relatively short amount of time. For me, this book is asking whether financial stability really leads to morality and more fulfilling lives (as in Major Barbara) or if perhaps we actually lose our souls once our bellies are fed.As some have mentioned in other reviews, Miranda is the stereotypical posh young artist. Born rich, it's easy for her to dismiss the complaints of the lower classes while at the same time hurling scorn at the society that produced her. I've met many people like Miranda (especially during my Masters at Columbia School of the Arts where trust fund babies were the norm, I went to school with a Pulitzer heiress for goodness sake) and usually found them boring and shallow, quick to namedrop an artist or recite tired rhetoric. But as her story progressed I began to like her more and more; Miranda is extremely self-aware, and I sensed that given time, she would grow out of her naivety and become a truly amazing woman. She is only 20 after all, barely an adult, and for all her idealistic pretension she is trying to evolve and grow (something that's can't be said for many of my Columbia peers). That's where the butterfly metaphor becomes even more apt; it's not just that she's a butterfly that Frederick has collected, it's what a butterfly represents: metamorphoses. It's almost as if Frederick has trapped her right when she was about to break out of her cocoon, halting her true beauty right before she was about to spread her wings. Which brings me to Frederick as a stand-in for middle-class mediocrity. Reading this book, I was often reminded of the idea that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Frederick is indifferent to everything: art, war, sex, etc. The only thing he seems to respond to is a fleeting type of beauty, and all he wants to do with that beauty is possess it. Not love it, not understand it, just possess it. His need to possess is similar to the middle classes need to buy buy buy with no thought as to why it’s important to own the largest house, drive the nicest car or watch the most expensive television. As we’ve seen with the rise of divorce, prescription drugs, therapy, suicides and the general malaise of the populace during the latter half of the 20th century these things rarely produce happiness, if anything they produce more anxiety as credit debt rises while wages fall. What Fowles seems to be asking is “what are we doing with all this money and success, are we living more stable fulfilling lives, or are we turning into something just as bad or worse than the elite we despise?” Frederick’s winning the lottery should have been an opportunity for him to live the life he wanted free of economic worries, not a chance to commit evil. Similarly, the rise of the middle class in America and the UK should have been a renaissance of ideas once our bellies were fed. In many ways it was (the civil rights and feminist movements come to mind), but in others, like the rise of reality television, celebrity culture and punditry news, our success has just made us comfortable and indifferent to human suffering. We go on collecting pop music, techno gadgets, houses, cars, spouses, designer clothes, with no question or investigation as to why. With the internet we have the opportunity to learn about anything and everything, for the first time in history the entire history of the world is available at our fingertips. Why then does misinformation and stupidity seem to be on the rise rather then the reverse? Why then are we becoming less literate rather than more? Why when given the world, we’re choosing the slum instead? I agree with Miranda when she says art collectors are the worst offenders. The idea that art is merely an investment (just like the idea that a house is merely an investment rather than a home you share your life in) is abhorrent to me. I could never stand to look at an ugly painting in my home just because it was worth money, nor could I ever live with myself if I hoarded Picassos or Bacons or Kirchners purely for my own benefit. Because the true lover of beauty (and not all beauty is beautiful as Bacon proves) wants to share that beauty with the world. They want everyone to see, hear, taste, feel, and enjoy that beauty so that others lives may be enriched as well. They want everyone to feel as passionately as they do about what they love, but more importantly they just want others to feel. (the example of the American soldier in the book comes to mind) Anyone, regardless of class, money, status etc., is capable of living passionately and truthfully. Frederick is a perfect example of someone who chooses not to, or worse, just doesn’t really care either way.
I suppose it would be possible to read this powerful and uncompromising novel as a straight thriller, but to do so would be to miss much. Fowles' first published novel is masterfully written, with an uncanny insight into its monstrous protagonist. The tale of the socially inept, emotionally retarded and morally bankrupt, Frederick Clegg, and his obsession with the young art student, Miranda Grey, is profoundly disturbing. Clegg is an amateur lepidopterist and an unimportant cog in the wheel at his job. A lonely and isolated man, keenly aware of his social class, he is deeply ingrained with the claustrophobic values and overbearing moral judgments of the aunt who has raised him; a man greatly concerned with superficial niceties and correct behavior. He spends his time mounting his butterflies, attending "bug meetings" and watching the local doctor's daughter. Then things seem to look up for Clegg, after winning big in the football pools, quitting his miserable job and seeing his smothering and domineering aunt and handicapped cousin off to relatives in Australia, Clegg brightens and starts to make a new life. Unfortunately, this means he begins to enact plans he has long fantasized to kidnap and imprison the object of his desire.The story unfolds in two main sections, the first Frederick's narrative of events and the second Miranda's diary of her captivity; a brief third section provides the tragic denouement. The novel works so well because while relating the events, as experienced by each character, the author manages to mount a fascinating debate about the nature of class structures, the economic rise of the lower classes and the differences in education and perception between those with the ability to create and appreciate the arts and the mindless masses. He also discusses belief in a higher power. Through Miranda, who goes from praying to a neglected God, to believing he is a cold, impersonal deity, to doubting his existence altogether, Fowles examines the challenges and limitations of religious faith when confronted with prolonged exposure to and suffering from human evil. Miranda, a vibrant young woman on the cusp of a productive life, uses every resources available to her: her beauty, wit, charm, intelligence, compassion, patience, courage and cunning but Clegg's passive brutality and single-mindedness thwart her at every turn. He is a dullard, with few intellectual resources but he has complete power within the microcosm of the little cottage prison he has constructed.Books like this are a challenge because of the subject matter but the rich subtext and the lack of sensationalized perversity and gratuitous gore make this more accessible and ultimately more terrifying than a novel like American Psycho. Fowles captures the banality of evil perfectly and leaves no doubt as to either it's reality or endurance.P.S.I was surprised after I posted my review that so many other readers on the site "hated" the victim and found her so unlikable. While I can see that Miranda was certainly hubristic and ambitious in some of her reflections on her life, she is also fragile and confused in others. Her attachment to an older mentor, in the form of the worldly painter, may appear fawning and snobbish to some but remember Miranda's background, her wealthy professional class parents - with their golf club and martinis, for her the choice to be an artist or appreciate the bohemian G.P. is radical. I think we must remember the basic fact that this is the story of a "college kid", as she would undoubtedly be termed today, and consider the horrendous situation she is in. Ask yourself if this was a news story and not a novel, what would be your basis for judging Miranda?
What do You think about The Collector (1998)?
Published in 1963 and made into a feature length film two year later, John Fowles's debut novel is a disconcerting read about obsession. Frederick Clegg is a lonely and uneducated man who works in a low level job and enjoys collecting butterflies. His one true love is a young art student named Miranda Grey and after coming into a lot of money comes to a horrendous plan to be with her. After buying a house in the country, Frederick after much preparation, kidnaps Miranda and keeps her locked up in the basement of his new home in the hope that eventually she will grow to love him just as much as he thinks he loves her.Wrote through different view points in the first two chapters, Frederick is clearly someone who is incapable of relating to others and justifies in the most cold and emotionless prose the fantasy world he lives in. He believes he is completely reasonable in his thoughts and can win Miranda over by buying her whatever she needs. Miranda on the other hand, told through diary entries managed to get on my nerves almost right from the beginning. Instead of describing the terror of being held captive, what we get instead for the the most part is self obsessed drivel about herself or her older male friend G.P. This was only slightly offset by her occasional escape attempts that added some excitement to her accounts.The weird thing was for me that in the end i found myself far more sympathetic to the perpetrator than the victim. Frederick for the most part was harmless as a sad and pathetic individual but Miranda was as close to being unsympathetic as could be, with moods all over the place and thinking she is an individual but then being prepared to believe everything the older G.P. said. In the end Frederick managed to call his own bluff that made for a surprising and unexpected ending. Overall i found the collector and intriguing and screwed up read that despite the test of time has aged well. If you can get passed the endless bitching and carrying on in Miranda's diary then this is worth a read.
—Michael
Other things were supposed to be read first. But I'm finding I'm powerless in the grip of John Fowles.I don't like scary stories, yet I keep reading.I don't much like novels wherein almost all the characters are reprehensible, yet I keep reading.I don't much like admiting that my boss is right about most things, yet I agree with him more and more each book.What's most remarkable about The Collector is that for half the book I was totally unimpressed. The plot was engaging but the narrative style was so unlike The Magus so timid, so deferential I couldn't get worked up about it.Then he turns the whole thing on its head, once the novel becomes a diary of the captive, Miranda, it takes on Fowles' more familiar philosophical, introspective overtones, it unites the reader with the victim after so long a familiarity with the captor, Clegg. And knowing the final result isn't a hindrance but an aid, urging the reader to go on depsite the situational irony, to see exactly how she will devolve in time too.And again, Fowles manages to give the reader a vicious case of whiplash turning the one freeing element of Miranda's life into the justification for more imprisonment.I've often thought about the development of monsters or beasts in literature, and in Clegg, everything becomes far more realistic. Dorian Gray may still be the paragon of sinister behavior, but Clegg's innocently diabolical tendancies are mind blowing.A novel as much about art, humanity, and goodness as it is about sex and love and hate it's riveting and sickening at the same time.I don't know how he does it, but on I go in the exploration of his madness.
—MacK
My skin is still crawling when I think about this book, days after finishing it. Extremely well written, creepy, and mesmerizing - this was my first experience of reading a John Fowles book, and I will definitely read more of them. I got onto this one after reading the excellent review by Bonnie, which I strongly recommend. She said it much better than I could.Fowles makes very skillful use of first-person points of view here, alternating between the two main characters from one section of the book to the next. For me as a male reader, it was extremely painful to watch the male collector's thought process as his hideous plan evolves - a bit like being pushed, with feet skidding, to the edge of a cliff and then over.But what really sticks with me from his POV is the incremental logic of his story, and the way each new development just falls into place in his severely twisted mind. I kept wondering how anyone could possibly think that way, and the next bit of monologue kept providing all-too-logical answers. Logical, that is, if one is missing some crucial bits of the normal mindset, like conscience and empathy and such.The female POV was much more complex, and initially more confusing. I sorted my thoughts on these sections after some very helpful discussions with Bonnie and Wendy. In the end, I saw the series of transitions in her character as a kind of calculated and rational desperation. Along the way, she suffered increasingly severe effects of chronic sensory deprivation. These were overlaid by societal and class-conscious attitudes that colored her musings as she struggled to find a way out.This is a gripping story, very highly recommended for those who can handle a crawl through the darkness.
—Jim
