The Collector

Author: John Fowles

Rating: ⭐ 5/5

Date Read: 2017/09/14

Pages: 272

What did I just read? A psychological horror novel that gets the reader deep into the mind of a madman? A powerful meditation on the meaning of art? A retelling of Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest?

A love story?

The Collector plays around with post-modern ideas in just the way I enjoy. The narrative is wonderfully non-linear; the narrators themselves are unreliable. Fowles includes just enough intellectual references to major works in the Western Cannon that the reader with limited knowledge of literature would have trouble understanding Miranda’s inner world. However, the real joy comes from the recognition that Fowles does this even as he actively subverts the western literary tradition. He’s brilliant, and he knows it, and the reader does too.

I do not think that the book is a simple story about a butterfly collector who grows tired with insects and captures a woman, nor do I really think that Miranda truly represents the butterfly. No, Miranda refuses to be pinned down; she rejects confinement, she values freedom above all else. It is the reader who flits into the net, so taken in by the beautiful artifice of it all that they willingly accept the pins because the tableau presents such an aesthetically-arresting reconstruction of reality. Fowles has collected us, and, perversely, I love him all the more for it.