John Fowles (1963 [2004]) The Collector.

I’ve read this book before, like many books my head is full of cheap wood-glue and nothing really sticks. In terms of narrative structure it’s quite straight forward  and has been overtaken by international events such as the kidnapping of Natascha Kampush, or the kidnapping of the Cleveden Trio. The latter, in particular, shows  that foresight and planning aren’t really necessary and the hideaway doesn’t have to be a remote cellar. Commentors suggest tens of thousand of similar victims have faced similar plights.  It also shows that humans are adaptable animals. The strength of Fowles narrative, and the mark of classic books, is fact and fiction are indistinguishable.

Fredrick collects butterflys. This tells you almost everything you need to know about Fredrick, but its only one facet of his personality. It begins with the temporal ‘When’ and tells what the narrator was looking at, as we too as readers and voyeurs look over his shoulder, ‘she was home from her boarding-school I used to see her almost every day sometimes, because their house was opposite the Town Hall Annexe’. There is something familiar about that. The detail of boarding-school juxtaposed with not the Town Hall, but the Town Hall Annexe, tells the reader the distance they are apart in terms of class. The detail that nails it is the specific and the chilling, ‘In the evening I marked it in my observation diary, at first with an X, and then I knew her name with M’.

Fredrick relates how a pools win changed his life. It gave him the time and resources to collect Miranda’s beauty and deposit it in the tomb of a cottage in Sussex, which he’d converted for that purpose. His is a school-boy type pash that has become sinister and deadly. Nowadays, of course, we realise that a pools or lottery win is not necessary, all that is required is the relative physiological strength of a man, in relation to a woman, to keep her subdued and imprisoned. But this is too simplistic. Fredrick loves Miranda in a way she can never understand. She despises him and everything he stands for, but somehow feels sorry for him. This is the Stockholm syndrome, but I’m not sure such a psychological term had been invented in 1963 when the book was published.  Rather it is the relationship between Caliban and Miranda in The Tempest that is  mirrored, with Fredrick unwittingly changing his name to Ferdinand, to disguise his true identity. Ferdinand is Miranda’s beau in the play and there is no Ariel of John Dee like figure to separate the watched and the watchers and the rapist and the would-be-lovers.

Miranda, like Fredrick, is a virgin. The reader knows this because, in diary form, the kidnap and what led up to it, is told from her point of view. She’s an art student that won a scholarship to Slade, very beautiful and her life is rich with variety, but like Miranda in The Tempest, she’s a new imago whose wings have not stretched  and dried.

Fredrick is a crocodile. While the butterfly can flutter and think she can understand the crocodile and the crocodile can never flutter or think far beyond his next meal. There are differences in age and gender, but can they be reconciled? Are we butterflys or crocodiles, or a bit of both? Good books leave such questions unanswered. I moth go now. I’ve said too much and my mouth’s too big for my head. Oh dear, new year.