Review: The Collector

The Collector by John Fowles
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Some books don’t age well. You can still see some of the skill that Fowles brings to this, and there are still glimpses of 1970s-era popular philosophies in conversation: what are the ethics of living in a world with the hydrogen bomb? How can I be a self and still invest my energy in art? What are the lingering effects of class in a nouveau riche context?. So it’s not entirely confusing to see that it once figured as a serious novel.

But today? It just doesn’t fly to have a novel about an emotionally limited man – we might be inclined to see him as Asperberger-y in this moment – who kidnaps, or “collects” a young woman and locks her in his basement. It’s clearly a send-up on a deep-seated misogyny, but like a movie that parodies pornography to the point of being pornographic, this seems to reinforce the misogyny its critiquing. Strip away its veneer of seriousness, and this feels like one of those lurid paperbacks from the 1960s or one of those slasher films of the middle 1980s.

Miranda, trapped in the basement, is mostly an object here. The novel laments that but then proceeds to wallow in it. To paraphrase much of it, “How awful that such a man could feel entitled simply to take a woman for his ‘collection.’ Now let’s linger over the details of how he did it.”

Part Two seems to attempt to address some of that fundamental problem by switching from the male perspective to Miranda’s, but even there we see something that may have been invisible when Fowles wrote this: Miranda’s inner world is still shaped by the pressures of men, whether her kidnapper or an overbearing art professor who questions whether women can ever be true artists. In Part One, she’s the object of a pornographic gaze; in Part Two she’s aware of that gaze and then given little alternative but to exploit and be exploited by it. She plays at being the mistress in a master/slave dynamic, and she determines to use her sexuality to manipulate Frederick only to learn that he [SPOILER:] intends to take pornographic photos of her to help keep her from thinking about escape. She is rarely given license to defend herself physically, and when she gets it she’s not strong enough to make an impact – even when she’s swinging an axe against an unarmed, unprepared man. And, to add insult to all that, she blandly accepts the verdict of her artist mentor that she lacks the talent ever to be a serious artist.

The bottom line remains here that this is an uncomfortable, at times excruciating book to read today. I knocked out the first half quickly and determined I didn’t like it. I stuck it out because I was morbidly curious to know how Fowles would resolve it.

[SPOILER:] And even that conclusion seems dated. Rather than resolve things on its own terms, Fowles introduces a sudden and fatal condition for Miranda. (This for an otherwise healthy 20 year old woman.) She dies as he bungles an effort to get her medicine. Then, having resolved to kill himself and make it look like a dead lover’s pact (she’s become the accepting dream girl in her death) he finds the journal that constitutes Part Two (it’s unclear how she otherwise hid it from him in a room where she had no agency, but there you go) and, deciding she was always trying to manipulate him, ends the novel by contemplating the kidnapping of a young woman who bears a resemblance to her.

I suppose there’s supposed to be irony in the fact that Frederick, having glimpsed his own madness, learns nothing. What isn’t ironic is that I don’t feel I’ve learned all that much either – except possibly that as a culture we can grow intellectually, aesthetically, and ethically.


View all my reviews