CBR Bingo: Minds
I remember GP saying that collectors are the worst animals of all. He meant art collectors, of course. I didn’t really understand, I thought he was just trying to shock Caroline—and me. But of course, he is right. They are anti-life, anti-art, anti-everything.
I have had John Fowles’ The Collector in my library for a number of years. I recently read that it was one of the first modern psychological thrillers, so it seemed like a good match for the “Minds” category.
The protagonist of The Collector, Frederick Clegg, is a quiet man who becomes rich after betting on soccer and has a predilection for stalking young women and peeping on amorous couples. He is a butterfly collector who wishes to “collect” a particular young woman, Miranda, with whom he is obsessed. He purchases a cottage and converts its basement into an unbreachable prison. He abducts Miranda one night and brings her home. The book alternates between Clegg’s POV and Miranda’s.
I was struck by how different this book was from other books I’ve read about young women in jeopardy. Often the victims are painted one-dimensionally, with no agency, no real depth. It’s their predicament and the character of the abductor that dominates. But in The Collector, Miranda is a strong, fascinating character. She goes back and forth between resisting Clegg and manipulating him. She engages him in conversations that keep him off balance. When he shows her his butterfly collection, she says, “I’m thinking of all the butterflies that would have come from these if you’d let them live. I’m thinking of all the living beauty you’ve ended.” He later says, “All I’m asking….is that you understand how much I love you, how much I need you, how deep it is.”
While there are some escape attempts, the real tension is what exists between them day in and day out, the captive and the captor. It amazed me that there could be so much momentum in a book that is essentially just two people in a room. Its domesticity starts to seem so normal that it’s easy to forget how sick the whole thing is. Clegg is so pathetic that you almost feel sorry for him. Then Miranda comes into view, so alive and such a fighter, and the reader remembers the horror of what she’s enduring.
The mind and its depths are explored throughout the entire book. Psychological manipulation occurs on both sides. Truths are revealed between them. Early in the book, Miranda says:
“Don’t look like that,” she said. “What I fear in you is something you don’t know is in you.”
What, I asked. I was still angry.
“I don’t know. It’s lurking somewhere about in this house, this room, this situation, waiting to spring. In a way we’re on the same side against it.”
I found this book riveting. Fowles is a genius at revealing character. Each conversation between them reveals something important or exposes some part of themselves to the other. Miranda is an assertive, savagely smart heroine. The more the book progressed, the more I admired her, and the more I hated Clegg. Fowles also does a really good job of writing in a young woman’s voice.
There is an interesting angle where Clegg’s hang ups—his deep shame and revulsion about the body and sex, alongside his concurrent excitement about controlling Miranda and his voyeurism—are made fun of by Miranda. She even lures him with her naked body, an act that is in desperation for her freedom, but there is also her pushing him to be human. She has this amazing speech, where she says to Clegg:
“You despise the real bourgeois classes for all their snobbishness and their snobbish voices and ways. You do, don’t you? Yet all you put in their place is a horrid little refusal to have nasty thoughts or do nasty things or be nasty in any way. Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?”
I don’t know what you’re talking about, I said.
“Yes you do. Why do you keep on using these stupid words—nasty, nice, proper, right? Why are you so worried about what’s proper? You’re like a little old maid who thinks marriage is dirty and everything except cups of weak tea in a stuffy old room is dirty. Why do you take all the life out of life? Why do you kill all the beauty?”
The Collector is much more than a thriller about a woman in distress and the evil man holding her captive. It’s a deep dive into the psyche of both victim and aggressor, and the power each holds. There is no doubt Clegg is evil, but we are brought into his full world view, just as we are brought into Miranda’s. This made for a deeper book than the average suspense novel.
