Customer Reviews

The Collector

5 star:		(62)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

With the exception of Nabokov's Lolita, this is the best book I have ever read. From the very moment I laid my hands on it I could not put it down and I have re-read it many times since. The premise is as such: a clerk (Frederick Clegg) becomes obsessed with a pretty art student (Miranda Grey) and holds her captive in his basement. Half of the story is told from Clegg's point of view in a recollective style, whilst the rest (the middle section) is relayed through Miranda's diary. The obvious differences in their views on life and the impossibility of them ever reaching a common ground is what grips you. Brilliant characterization and a brilliant study of human behaviour. Many people have suggested that The Magus was Fowle's best work, but The Collector puts it in the shade. Compelling.

Much time has passed since John Fowles, now a major international author, first wrote and published "The Collector", in 1963. In many ways, it was the prequel to a myriad of psychological thrillers (by other writers) involving obsession. Fowles, an enormous success based on this, his first novel, has gone on to a distinguished career and writing that is far more complex and layered than what we encounter here.

That said, reading "The Collector", one cannot help but be impressed at how Fowles sets the story, and how the point of view of the reader is rather voyeuristic -- we see the entire plot by reading the journals of the two protagonists, peering into a series of events they share by contrasting point of view.

Fowles leads us into the story through the eyes of Ferdinand Clegg, a clerk who wins a sum of money in "the pools". He sends his odd relatives off on a global jaunt, and uses the bulk of the money to buy a lonely cottage with a cellar that he turns into a secure prison of sorts. The object of his attention is a young and vibrant art student named Miranda. All his life Clegg (or Caliban, as Miranda dubs him) has collected butterflies. He now means to use his skills as a hunter, curator and collector, to possess Miranda, whom he has been stalking for several months.

In the plotting that is Clegg's, Fowles is remarkably detached from the world, helping his readers see it from the slightly oppressed viewpoint of the British middle class; only Clegg has thoughts and needs suppressed for many years, that are frightening in their focused simplicity. Of the capture of Miranda, Clegg relates:

"It finally ten days later happened as it sometimes does with butterflies. I mean you go to a place where you know you may see something rare and you don't, but the next time not looking for it you see it on a flower right in front of you, handed to you on a plate, as they say."

In reading Clegg's story, the reader feels touched, albeit briefly, by his madness, which is wrapped in the coat of a lonely young man.

The second part of the book allows the reader to come to know Miranda, through her secret journal. As vibrant as Clegg is dull, Miranda has been very caught up in the life of an artist, including her college dabbling with a teacher-type paramour, known to the reader as "G.P.". Much of what is absorbing in Miranda's world ceases with her capture. Her portion of the tale is a struggle with the alternating fear and loathing of Caliban, and the instinctive need to understand him, so that she might use that understanding to seek her freedom. Her faith in God ebbing, her despair and disdain for her captor growing, Miranda's shattered by her captivity. She says of him:

"He's not human; he's an empty space disguised as a human."

Inevitably, at the close of the captivity, the end of the story is told by Caliban, detached from the role he plays in how Miranda's story ends. Freshly shocked from this, the reader begins Chapter 4 unsettled, only to find that Caliban has disconnected from what he's done, and is preparing to do it again by stalking a young girl named Marian. It is this reopening of the cycle of violence and oppression that truly makes your blood run cold, truly introduces you to the brilliance that is Fowles' as a writer.

Your Fowles bookshelf is incomplete without "The Collector". Highly recommended.

The Collector was John Fowles's first published novel. It is the tale of a misunderstood nerd named Fred Clegg, a clerk and butterfly collector who wins a substantial sum of money, and Miranda, the beautiful young art student he becomes obsessed with. The first section of the book is written from Fred's point of view, and you get a good view inside the mind of the insane as he makes it seem reasonable, almost inevitable, when he kidnaps her and keeps her prisoner in his hidden basement. Even though it is obvious that he is mad, the reader can't help but feel some sympathy for him, even as he deteriorates into his criminal acts.

The suspense of the novel is very well done, and from the beginning, it's hard to put the book down. Fred tells Miranda his name is Ferdinand, because he thinks the name sounds more sophisticated and exotic. So we have Ferdinand and Miranda. Get it? We got it. Evidently, so did Miranda, because in the second section of the novel we get her point of view, and she refers to him as Caliban in the journal she keeps during her captivity.

Much is made of the class difference between the two in their own point of view narratives. Fred kidnaps Miranda because he doesn't have a chance with girls of her type, and in her captivity, she comes to know him, and they have a strange relationship of jailer and prisoner, tormentor and victim. As she comes to know him, she finds herself almost seeking his company as the only human being she has seen since he took her. But she is still held prisoner, as much a part of his collection as the butterflies pinned to his display trays.

The pacing of the book is so quick, it was over before I knew it. The writing is intense, and the point of view of the captive and captor are both explored in a startlingly realistic, in-depth character study, examining human emotion, connections, religion, art, and the driving need for freedom. The ending is foreshadowed from the beginning, so although it's not really a surprise, the suspense of following the events from both perspectives keeps the reader riveted.

when i finished reading 'THE COLLECTOR', i threw the book across the room in frustration and disgust. such is the power of john fowles, luring the reader deeper and deeper into a world of twisted fantasy which is portrayed in a terrifyingly realistic fashion. the book centres around two characters, fred clegg, a quietly insane and lonely man who loves to collect butterflies (hence the name of the book - a strong metaphor), and miranda, a girl that he imprisons in his house so that she can know and love him. clegg feels disadvantaged in many ways, and so takes out all his feelings of rejection and inadequacy on his unfortunate prisoner. i have read some reviews that suggest that the book should not have been divided into sections - miranda's and clegg's - and on this point i would have to entirely disagree. the juxtapositioning of the two points of view is the very essence of the story, showing the two sides of human life: on miranda's part, her passion for life and discovery, for learning and making a difference; and clegg's, showing his selfishness, rigidness and desire to own or kill everything that shows vibrance and emotion, everything he is not. this was fowles' intention, to show us that we all have both good and evil inside us,that mirnada was not entirely perfect and clegg was not entirely evil, but that the evil in clegg eventually overcame miranda's good. this book is a dire warning to human kind to embrace life and see that we have opportunities outside what we are given, that we always have the option of free thinking.in a way, clegg was more trapped than miranda: her in body, but him in spirit.

I read this book in Russia for the first time and since then it has been my #1 reccomendation for anyone who claims they are impervious to the evils of human nature. This book grips you from the first sentence as you spiral down into the depths of Caliban's psychotic obsessions, the well-planned out kidnapping, and ultimately sets you down in a lonely basement. I was able to identify with both personas, and the ambivalence which pervaded my heart during the reading told me something magically disturbing was happening. John Fowles is a master, and there is an element of genious in this work. I have never been effected so profoundly by a book in all my life; there were times I had to actually lift my eyes from the pages and stare at a wall in tantalizing amazement at how this book was making me feel. If this was the only work Fowles ever wrote, his immortality would still be assured. The inevitability of what happens in the end in no way diminishes the bitter, heart-twisting tears when you realise she "is gone" forever. A very, very painful moment...probably the most painful page to read in all of 20th century western literature. This is by far the most profoundly intense book I have ever read, and it will occupy a special place in my heart for as long as I live.

The Collector is a novel that really does work on more than one level. On the surface, it's a harrowing thriller about a demented butterfly collector who kidnaps and imprisons a young art student in the basement of his country home. It also works as an allegory about good and evil, a study of class resentment in Britain, and a meditation on the nature of obsession, love, and identity. It's also a gripping dual character study.

The book begins with the collector's chillingly matter-of-fact account of how he came to add the lovely and brilliant Miranda Grey to his quarry. Frederic Clegg is not initially a bad man, just a lonely one. His ultimate evil comes from his indifference to the lives of others. Once you finish this section and start reading Miranda's journal, the central part of the book, you instantly realize the horror and absurdity of the situation. The collector is in love with an image, not a human being. His attempts to make his prisoner fall in love with him are as futile as her attempts to escape. This section could almost be another novel in itself. Despite her plight, Miranda comes to the realization that her jailer is even more horribly trapped than she. The peculiar sympathy she comes to feel for Clegg is one of the strangest and saddest elements of the story. If anything, it makes you loathe him all the more.

The darkness of Fowles' vision of man's true nature is reminiscent of Golding's in Lord of the Flies. It may be the most depressing novel I've ever read; I really did feel devastated by the conclusion. Despite this, I have to recommend it. On finishing the book, I thought of a line from a Bob Dylan song: "Sometimes I think this world is one big prison yard/Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards."

Frederick Clegg is a seemingly ordinary young man, a clerical worker in the local Town Hall, who wins a large sum of money on the football pools and uses the money to buy an old country cottage on the South Downs near Lewes. Clegg has fallen obsessively in love with Miranda, an attractive young art student whom he knows only by sight, and kidnaps her, imprisoning her in the basement of his cottage. His intention, however, is not to rape her; he never attempts to have sex with her or even to kiss her without her consent. He believes that if he holds her captive for long enough she will eventually fall in love with him.

The story is divided into four chapters, of which the first two are by far the longest. The first is narrated by Frederick and the second by Miranda; the third and fourth chapters, also told from Frederick's viewpoint, form a brief coda at the end. The advantage of this double first-person narration is that it enables Fowles to use his characters' own words to build up a picture of their personalities.

The picture of Frederick is particularly chilling. His one obsessive passion, other than his passion for Miranda, is for collecting butterflies (hence the title of the book), and Fowles uses this as a metaphor for Miranda's situation. He kidnaps her by drugging her with the chloroform that he uses in his "killing jar", and thereafter she becomes, as it were, just another specimen, pinned and displayed for his pleasure. Although he is well aware that what he has done is illegal, there is no sense that he realises that it is immoral. Morality is a concept quite alien to him. His only concern is for the gratification of his own desires, and the rights or feelings of others do not enter into the picture. Frederick seems to have a deep-rooted sense of grievance against the world in general; this arises partly from a sense of social inferiority (he is from an impoverished lower middle-class background and resents the wealthier classes from which Miranda comes) and partly from an unhappy childhood when he was orphaned at an early age and brought up by a strict, narrow-minded aunt. One person he particularly resents is his disabled cousin Mabel- not because of anything that she has done to him but because he is expected to sympathise with her disability and cannot do so. Frederick is so full of self-pity that he has no pity to spare for anyone else.

Miranda attracts our sympathy because of her plight, but in many ways she is not a sympathetic character. She is a snob, but despite her wealthy background hers is not the social and economic snobbery of wealth and position. It is rather an intellectual and cultural snobbery of education and taste. She despises Frederick, but only partly for the obvious reason that he is a psychopathic criminal. She also despises him because he is philistine about the Arts and apathetic about politics. (Politically Miranda is on the Left, but she prefers those who are actively right-wing, with whom she can at least have a debate, to those who have no political views). She even despises him for trivial reasons, such as the china ducks on his walls (a popular form of decoration at this period, but one that was often derided as tasteless) and the fact that he uses the supposedly lower-class expression "lounge" rather than the more genteel "sitting-room". (The fifties and early sixties were a time of great interest in the "U and Non-U" linguistic aspects of the British class system).

Despite Miranda's left-wing politics, she dislikes not only the haute bourgeoisie represented by her own family but also the traditional working class whom she sees as being equally narrow and insular. Her particular loathing, however, is for what she calls the "New People", those members of the working class who have prospered in material terms during the "Never Had It So Good" Macmillan era but who in her opinion suffer from a spiritual poverty as great as the material poverty of earlier generations. The only class of people whom she admires are a small, enlightened intellectual and artistic elite, of which she counts herself a member, forever at war with the philistinism and the baseness of the New People. The greatest influence on her life is her lover George Paston ("G.P."), a much older modernist painter. In her eyes the typical New Person is Frederick, and GP the antithesis of a New Person.

Throughout the novel are a number of allusions to other works of literature, not only classics such as Jane Austen's "Emma", but also recent works such as Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" and Sillitoe's "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning". The greatest number of references (including Miranda's own name) are taken from Shakespeare's "The Tempest"; Frederick pretends that his name is Ferdinand (which he thinks is more "classy" than his own), but Miranda thinks of him as Caliban.

Most of the physical action of the book is completed by about page thirty, after Frederick has successfully kidnapped Miranda. Most of the rest of the book is taken up with the changing mental relationship between the two, particularly with Miranda's changing feelings, which alternate between fear, hatred, contempt and even pity for Frederick. In a way, he is pitiable, being as much a prisoner as she is. While she is a captive in the physical sense, he is a captive of his own mad obsession. He is forced to continue to hold Miranda captive, partly because of fear that she will inform the police as soon as she is released but mostly because his life will become empty of meaning without her. The ending, in which Frederick plans the kidnap of another girl, shows that he has learnt nothing.

The most impressive thing about the book is the way in which Fowles is able to enter brilliantly into the minds of his characters, showing us on the one hand a young man in the grip of an insane passion and on the other a rather smug, spoilt young woman suddenly confronted with a terrifying situation beyond her control. An excellent first novel.

No book plunges deeper into the heart of darkness than John Fowles extraordinary first novel, *The Collector*. Patrick McCabe's *The Butcher Boy* comes close, but Freddy Clegg is the banality of evil given unwilling flesh with none of the operatic violence of McCabe's psychopath. His slow descent into murder is all the more frightening in that it is not a descent at all but a revelation, of the consistency of his alienation and sociopathy.

I've seen complaints that Freddy's tedious blandness is boring reading. My sympathy. I don't remember too clearly my first reading (I read the book for the fifrth time recently), but I still read hoping, hopelessly, that he will crack somehow, that something will break through his crazed porcelain surface to a human heart.

The astonishing thing about the book is that it is not, in any sense, an exercise in sadism. Miranda's suffering is never enjoyable; Freddy's cruelty is never attractive. I always felt that the movie erred in casting a vaguely attractive person like Terence Stamp for the role, and early paperback covers depict a similarly romantic figure. Freddy begins as a non-entity, as heroic as Eichmann, and he descends from that depth to a degradation, an abdication of humanity that is absolute.

Miranda reminds me, in her vulnerability, of a statue I once saw at the Denver Art Museum. The artist (John de Andrea?) was doing three-dimensional photorealism. He had sculpted his model as a sleeping nude so lifelike that she was startling. But his wonderful gem was a lifesize sculpture, also nude, of the same model standing up, staring back at us, her body language conveying so unambiguously the helpless humiliation of being nude in a room of the clothed. She was unbearable to look at. I stayed at the exhibit for a quarter hour to watch the reactions of patrons confronted by this image, and it was uniform: embarrassment and discomfort.

It is brilliant book, *The Collector*, an absolutely flawless portrait of alienation and sociopathy, an exercise in tragedy. What a wonderful beginning for a brilliant novelist's career.

The Collector was yet another of those books I fell in love with in my teens even while it played unpleasant games with my mind and left me profoundly depressed as a result of letting myself not just read it, but get (too) deeply into it. For several post-read weeks when I was fifteen, I had dreams about this book, it crossed my mind dozens of times per day, and I got to having strange, probably misplaced, concerns that something like Miranda's fate was going to be my own. Quaint fears in retrospect but important to me at the time.

The Collector by John Fowles, is the story of Miranda, an idealistic, beautiful young student of twenty, and Frederick, the "Collector" who abducts her and holds her captive in a well-furnished cellar of an old country house. Frederick has long had a fascination for butterflies--more specifically with capturing and mounting them for display--and to his mind, Miranda is one more lovely and prized specimen to possess and enjoy. He seems to be a man of virtually no conscience, though he has fits of generosity and truly appears to be in love with Miranda. Frederick has long been obsessively captivated by Miranda, whom he observes as she attends art classes and associates with friends across the street from where Frederick works. For many months, it remains simply this: an inconsequential attraction on the part of a lonely, slightly warped young man for a beautiful girl who scarcely knows he exists.

And then...a change.

Frederick wins a small fortune in a sort of lottery, and is able to quit his job and, in the excess of time this leaves him, formulate a simple, yet cunning plan to kidnap Miranda and bring her into his life, the greatest and loveliest capture for his collection. He buys the old house I mentioned above, constructs a prison in a hidden subterranean cellar (once a hideout of renegade priests during times of anti-Catholic persecution) and decks this room out with every manner of luxury he can imagine Miranda might ever want. He assures us (and himself) he will grant her every courtesy and never harm her in any way, and yet he also has no intentions of ever permitting her freedom. He then concocts the manner in which he shall obtain his human butterfly, and sets off to make it happen...

I can say without fear that all this is mild foreshadowing of what occurs in this intense yet rapidly-paced, easily-flowing novel. Fowles resolves matters quickly so he can observe for himself what comes next. What he treats us to is the interplay between two human beings in what could easily become a claustrophobic setting. This is a novel about interaction, about reaction, about inaction and about how normal the abnormal can be made to seem. It's a great work by a man whose career saw many great works, and it is quite possibly the best first novel in the last fifty years. I re-read The Collector at least every year or two and as I mentioned in my title up there, I always find something new in the plot or dialogue I'd missed all the other times, that adds a theretofore unknown dimension to Fowles' classic.

Alienated, impotent council clerk and amateur butterfly collector, Fred Clegg, 25, wins the Pools. Within weeks he's quit his job, farewelled his oppressive aunt and spastic cousin on a long trip to Australia, and set about converting a Sussex cellar into a prison for Miranda Grey, the 20 year-old art student he's been ardently admiring since she was in boarding school ... Fowles' startlingly accomplished first novel begins as an exploration of what happens to a man when the controlling pressure of living in the everyday world is lifted by money, giving him both the power and the idleness to follow his dark fantasies to fruition. But that all happens in the first twenty-odd pages. Fowles is actually more interested in what happens next - how the captive and the captor get on. With that in mind, the novel soon morphs into something more sustainable and actually far more interesting: it's ultimately an exploration of obsessive love, British class consciousness, and their connection to two conflicting understandings of beauty - is it something that can be captured and admired, or is it something that must be lived and allowed to live, because to capture it is to snuff it out? Fowles cleverly builds his case by offering two perspectives on the events - Fred's blunt retrospective, and Miranda's diary which she secrets under the mattress in her basement prison. Fred's account is polite, reserved, and plagued by self-consciousness; Miranda's is effusive, filled with escape plots, speculations, memories and artistic and literary parallels (Shakespeare's "Tempest" and Austen's "Emma" feature prominently). Fowles' novel not only takes us inside the minds of a psychopath and his victim, but also into the heart of mid-century Britain with its embarrassed bourgeoisie, elitist creative "few", and the hideous New People - the tasteless new rich whom Miranda and her philandering hero, the artist G.P., credit with the destruction of everything good in the world. It's in this kind of critical sociology that Fowles' real concern lies, I suspect, but he wraps it in an ice-cold thriller which makes it never less than totally compelling.