The collector
The collector (original title: The Collector ) is the title of a 1963 novel by the English writer John Fowles . William Wyler's film adaptation of the material under the German distribution title Der Fänger (1965) was nominated for three Oscars . At the Cannes Film Festival, Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar received the best actor awards.
Like several other works by Fowles, the collector describes the depths of human activity, here in the guise of a kidnapping story, which does not rely on the usual set pieces of the crime genre. Perhaps the biggest difference is that the kidnapper is not a sex offender and any sexual assault does not occur. The novel is Fowles' first published work and an international bestseller.
Action overview
1st chapter
The novel is about a young office worker named Frederick Clegg who works in a city administration, collects butterflies in his free time and, as the reader quickly notices, is of a very simple nature.
In the first part of the story, Frederick, the first-person narrator, reveals his inability to sense emotions and relate to people in cool language with frequent use of slang idioms.
Frederick feels drawn to Miranda Gray, a twenty-year-old doctor's daughter and an art student. When one day he wins a large sum in the soccer pool , he can quit his job and buy a remote country house. He chases Miranda, anesthetizes her with chloroform and keeps her prisoner in the prepared country house - with a hidden dungeon in the basement. He expects that feelings develop between them, because he dreams that he "owns" a graceful woman - but Miranda defends herself and is far superior to him in this and at all intellectually. On the one hand, Frederick reveals to the reader that he is overwhelmed, on the other hand he counters challenging remarks by Miranda with self-assurances such as that he “does not fall for her games”.
Frederick buys her all sorts of things: expensive clothes, good food and illustrated books especially for the painting student - and if she is not satisfied, he wonders what else he should give her.
The first part ends with Miranda Gray having breathing problems: she can barely breathe and coughs blood-smeared phlegm. However, Frederick assumes a simple flu, he sees it as just a trick by Miranda, because she had previously faked an illness in order to be able to tackle one of her failed attempts to escape.
Part 2
In the second part of the story, Miranda Gray has her say. Using her diary entries, she describes the full duration of her imprisonment. There she calls Frederick Ferdinand first, but then Caliban, as the wild, defaced slave in Shakespeare's play " The Tempest " is called - while the lovers in it, ironically, actually bear the names Ferdinand and Miranda. Various conversations between Frederick and Miranda are reproduced verbatim in speech and counter-speech in the diary. Miranda also tells of an older artist (named GP only by his initials) to whom she feels very drawn, although he offends her with his criticism of her painting: that she may have talent, but that she has not yet succeeded in to bring their own personality into their works. She has deep respect for his opinion and his whole character and values, yes, ultimately loves him - something that stands in complete contrast to the contact between the prisoner Miranda and her prison guard Frederick, as she very clearly feels and names it.
Furthermore, she describes the stupid, exaggerated correctness of her kidnapper and that he always replies to her questions and constant requests for the promised release with excuses and platitudes. She fantasizes about ways to kill Frederick and makes daring attempts to escape, but all of them fail. In her hopelessness and out of compassion, Miranda tries to seduce Frederick - but he proves to be impotent on the one hand, and a completely socially incompetent person on the other, completely misunderstanding these signals as "dirty" prostitution and rejecting them in the worst possible way.
3rd part
The third and fourth parts of the novel are told again by Clegg: he realizes too late that Miranda is terminally ill, and fails in his half-hearted and blind eye to reality when he tries to call a doctor overdue. Miranda dies in an agonizing way, which Clegg observes meticulously and describes distantly, as if it were his butterflies. He is considering committing suicide.
4th part
Everything turns out differently than planned: When Clegg finds the diary of the deceased and reads the passage in it that she never loved him, he decides not to feel responsible for her death. He begins to vaguely plan the kidnapping of another young woman, but wants to show her from the start who is the master of the house.
For literary classification
What makes the book a relative solitaire in the popular criminological genre include the following special features. B. not only irritate crime readers with certainty:
In its second part, the novel introduces a person who is important for the kidnapped Miranda Gray, but is completely absent, the painter GP, who is twenty years older than him. On the one hand, he showed her (s) a world of free spirit and bohemianism and set an example for her, a world which for her is pleasantly different from her facade of social conventions, which was shaped by her strict boarding days. On the other hand, the remembered conversations between her and him represent an in-depth examination of art, especially modern painting, but also music, in which the elder, not very pedagogically, but all the more clearly shows the student's culturally pessimistic perspectives. In that regard, the book is a precursor of later works by Fowles, in which he returns again and again to such aspects, especially in its artists novella The Ebony Tower 1974 (German The Ebony Tower ).
Irritatingly, GP describes people who view modern art, but basically all art and artists, with skepticism, as well as all non-political or non-leftist positions, as the “new people” (“new” does not mean a positive thing for him ). Among them, unknown to him of course, are people like Frederick, what attitude this takes on Miranda.
Furthermore, the second part is pervaded by open and hidden allusions to other writers and their books such as B. on JD Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye , 1951 (German catcher in the rye ), whose main character, the young Holden Caulfield, Miranda offers her kidnapper to identify with - whom he rejects as "too vulgar" for himself, and on Alan Sillitoes Roman Saturday Night and Sunday Morning from 1958 (German Saturday night to Sunday morning ) because of similar parallels to its hero from the working class, Arthur Seaton. Above all, the links to the staff and the plot of Shakespeare's play Der Sturm , which also plays a recurring role in Fowles' subsequent novel The Magus from 1965 (German Der Magus ), hover . In short, The Collector is also a treasure trove for literary detective games.
Incidentally, Miranda explains to Frederick that she was critical of the current threat of nuclear war in the Cold War when the novel was written - the first US hydrogen bomb tests had taken place in the 1950s. Miranda brings her kidnapper - and the reading audience - the beginnings of the anti-nuclear power, the Easter march and peace movements close, with which she fails with Frederick all along the line. He doesn't even forward the check that was pressed from him for the movement, as promised.
Overall, the novel offers the meticulous description of an obsession of relentless consistency. The extremely weakly intelligent kidnapper shows both his moral weakness and his emotional incompetence in the implementation of his plan up to and including the final misfortune. The novel is one of the most descriptive literary representations of a serious medical-psychological disorder of all, and in terms of clarity and comprehensibility, although anything but simplistic in terms of popular science, it appears to be superior to many clinical cases.
various
- The book is alluded to in a double episode ( The Fisher King Part 1 + 2, German: Die Suche Part 1 and 2) of the American television series Criminal Minds : A man kidnaps a blonde girl and leaves the investigators with various objects that appear on the cover picture the first edition are shown, and information about the book will be sent.
- Several pop and rock songs, including The Everly Brothers , The Jam , Nine Inch Nails and Slipknot , were inspired by the book.
Available editions
- The collector , translated by Maria Wolff, List (Ullstein Taschenbuchverlag), Munich 2002, 331 pages, ISBN 3-548-60224-X
- The Collector , Random House UK, 281 pages, ISBN 0-09-947047-0
Web links
- detailed table of contents
- The collectors in the Internet Movie Database (English)