Country: U.K
Genre: Thriller
Pages: 305
“I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.”
I didn't know who John Fowles even was before reading Brenna's fantastic review of THE COLLECTOR, last month. That's one of the biggest upsides to have reading as a hobby. You think you know what there is to know about it, that you know all the cool hangouts and then another reader comes out of the left field and introduces you so something completely new. THE COLLECTOR is sometimes referred to as the first psychological thriller, which is debatable, but which made it also very intriguing to me. I strongly doubted it at first, but THE COLLECTOR turned out to be such a full blown, picture perfect example of a psychological thriller, that it's hard not to consider everything that came before like proto-thrillers. Fowles is inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and Joseph Conrad, but he doesn't just turn it up a notch. THE COLLECTOR is something completely new for its time and it influenced a lot of literature of the late twentieth century.
The story will ring a bell and remind you of many others, but to my knowledge, Fowles was the first to give it a definite structure. Fred Clegg is a misadapted clerk and avid butterfly collector that nobody cares about, so isolation and alienation build up so much, he actually starts caring too much about everything. He becomes obsessed with Miranda, a young art student, so when he runs into money, he decides to kidnap her and hold her prisoner in his house (that is OF COURSE, it a remote area). So THE COLLECTOR is split in two halves of unequal lengths, the first is Clegg's perspective on things and the second, from Miranda's. There's also a small conclusion, but I'm not going to spoil you who has the last word. Because it's quite the tasteful ending.
If THE COLLECTOR is split the way it is, it's no sudden creative outburst. It's a calculated aesthetic decision from John Fowles. The reason why the novel is so disturbing and that the stakes are so much higher than your usual kidnapper novel, is that it's highly symbolic. It's literally, a fight in between life and death. Clegg is the manifestation of stillness, imprisoned beauty, still life, emptiness, imagined life, etc. as Miranda is vibrant with real life, love for art, movement, progressive ideas and creation. It's life vs death all over again. It could have gone stiff and predictable, if Fowles didn't write that gorgeous prose that makes you want to drop to one knee half of the time. Somehow, it makes it so fluid that it takes a life of its own.
"He is solid; immovable, iron-willed. He showed me one day his killing bottle. I'm imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it's all an illusion.
A thick round wall of glass."
John Fowles said in THE ARISTOS, that he wrote THE COLLECTOR because he felt that in a prospering society, power seldom fell in the hands of those unsuited to wield it. That sounds about right, safe for the suffocating, Poesque atmosphere. The novel is accurately titled THE COLLECTOR because what Clegg considers life never really grows outside the boundaries of his butterfly collection. It's his safe zone, it's who he is. There's something very childish to his actions because his collection is probably where he found refuge many years ago and sheltered from the world, among dead and immobile things, he never felt the need to adapt to outside life. THE COLLECTOR is a studious and detail oriented novel that hits all the right notes, because it's never straying away from its subject. And of course, the prose is beautiful. I'm now embarrassed that I didn't know John Fowles before. He's a terrific writer.