Product Description

Withdrawn, uneducated and unloved, Frederick collects butterflies and takes photographs. He is obsessed with a beautiful stranger, the art student Miranda. When he wins the pools he buys a remote Sussex house and calmly abducts Miranda, believing she will grow to love him in time. Alone and desperate, Miranda must struggle to overcome her own prejudices and contempt if she is to understand her captor, and so gain her freedom.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9770 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
He has a magnificent narrative gift...brilliant Independent A brilliant, unusual theme... Short and spare and direct, an intelligent thriller with psychological and social overtones Sunday Times

From the Publisher
'Brilliant…an artist of great imaginative power' Sunday Times

About the Author
John Fowles was born in England in 1926 and educated at Bedford School and Oxford University. John Fowles won international recognition with his first published title. THE COLLECTOR (1963). He was immediately acclaimed as an outstandingly innovative writer of exceptional imaginative power and this reputation was confirmed with the appearance of his subsequent works. John Fowles died in 2005.

Customer Reviews

Beautifully melancholic
I read this book in two days, which is pretty impressive for an idle student such as myself. Whilst reading 'The Collector' I realised I had to be on my own, I was that overwhelmed by its beauty and sadness that I often cried. When I wasn't reading I was thinking about it constantly, and now I've finished I want to start reading all over again. This is the power of this stimulating, disturbing and very haunting tale of sexual obsession. There are various themes that Fowles weaves throughout the story with incredible skill, such as the boundaries of both class and gender between the main characters.

This novel is so beautifully written, I cannot imagine anyone not enjoying it. It is darkly melancholic, and although you probably won't really *like* either of the main characters, you will never forget them. It is quite similar to Nabokov's novel 'Lolita'. Just as sad. Just as beautiful.

Fantastic portrayal of a young woman's emotional awakening
Having been utterly captivated by The Magus, I had to read some more of Fowles' work. He vivdly captures the feelings of an individual and transports you into their world and mind. The book is a haunting account of a woman imprisoned and leaves you questioning your innate feeling of trust in mankind. The story is gripping, yet simple. Fowles' writing is fluent, persuasive, absorbing and perceptive. He writes from a woman's perspective in a remarkable way - it becomes a fantastic account of a young woman's emotional awakening and of her growing feelings of the importance of life, experience, art, literature, music, and love, and of her frustration at being "collected". This is just a superb book for anyone who appreciates and values these things.

Spooky and thrilling
In 'The Collector', John Fowles explores the mind of a stalker who has the chance to make his fantasies come true. Throughout the novel, Frederick Clegg is likened to Caliban, from Shakespeare's 'The Tempest': stumbling ineptly after the object of his affections, and never managing to attract her or interest her. Winning some money gives Frederick the chance to kidnap and imprison Miranda, and we then see him attempt to fulfil his desires.

Frederick's character is both eerie and fascinating. There is a constant power struggle going on between him and Miranda. She is beautiful, well educated, confident, inspired, artistic - everything he is not, and although he is physically imprisoning her, he can't understand her. This frustrated desire to get inside her head undermines his capture of her, and at the same time, she is attempting to understand him, in order to be free. The relationship between the two characters is very well written, constantly changing and unpredictable.

Miranda, as the saner of the two, is easy to identify with, and yet the reader is also taken deeply inside Frederick's head as well. Again, it's an uneasy relationship between the reader and Frederick, as one hopefully doesn't support his actions(!), and yet the tone of his narration implies that the reader does. A very unsettling effect.

All in all, an excellent read, with an ending that will send shivers down your spine!