The title story—and by far longest piece in the book—concerns the visit of art critic David Williams to the manor of elderly painter William Breasley, who lives in seclusion with two young female assistants.
The cantankerous Breasley represents the artistic, free-spirited aspect of painting, while Williams is more controlled and intellectual. They ultimately engage in a verbal battle regarding the meaning and value of art, and the married Williams struggles with his increasing attraction to one of the women.
The four short stories in The Ebony Tower include three original works, plus the translation of an ancient fable. The Ebony Tower was published in , and reviews of the book were excellent. A year following its publication, the title story was adapted into a successful film for British television, with Laurence Olivier as Breasley and a young Greta Scacci as one of his assistants.
Fowles now returned to work on Daniel Martin , which became his longest novel at over pages. He is summoned back to England for the funeral of an old friend, whose widow is the sister of his ex-wife. The two rekindle their old friendship as Daniel attempts to rectify some of the mistakes and omissions from his past.
With Daniel Martin, Fowles takes a wide-ranging approach to themes relating to friendship, love, the nature of art, and the meaning of life itself. The exhilarating narrative style of his previous novels is sacrificed to a certain extent, with the focus more on well-rounded characters and long-term relationships.
Reviews of the book were strangely skewed—much like the initial reception of The Magus —with British reviewers finding it too long and preachy, and American reviewers being extremely favorable. Daniel Martin was published in A little-known point of issue exists on the U.
The Magus—A Revised Version was also published in , as Fowles found it impossible to stay away from his masterpiece which he always felt had appeared somewhat prematurely, before he had matured as a novelist. The revised version features a new forward by Fowles and several rewritten scenes.
Although the basic plot remains the same, changes include a more explicit eroticism—not as acceptable when Fowles began working on the original in the s—less of a supernatural element, and a somewhat less ambiguous ending.
Opinions seem divided on which version is better, with those who first read the book in its original form usually preferring that version, and vice versa. What is clear, however, is that Fowles has remained somewhat obsessed by The Magus over the years, as have many of its readers.
Fowles next novel, Mantissa, was originally intended to be privately published in a quantity of just copies. However, contractual obligations to Cape and Little Brown ultimately forced Fowles to agree to its mainstream publication.
He subsequently has several apparently imaginary dialogues with Erato, his muse, who assumes various forms throughout the novel. Themes include the struggle inherent to the creative process, the relationship between an author, his characters and the reader, and the clash of the sexes. Mantissa is the only novel by Fowles to receive a majority of negative reviews, and even his wife expressed the wish that he had never published it. At first glance it appears to be an 18th century historical novel, complete with the reproduction of genuine-looking documents and actual excerpts from a magazine of the time in question.
The reader, however, soon realizes that the narrator is unreliable and very little is to be taken at face value. A Maggot begins with a small group of travelers on horseback crossing the countryside in Before their journey ends, one of them will disappear, another will be hanged, and the others will face trial for murder. Subsequent mystical events and possible contact with travelers from the future lead to the founding of a new religious faith: the rather odd—and now defunct—Shakers.
Although reviews of A Maggot were somewhat mixed, it represented a return to form by Fowles after the disappointment of Mantissa. The years immediately following publication of A Maggot were not kind to Fowles. Fowles ultimately made a good recovery, but two years later his wife Elizabeth died of lung cancer. These two events combined did ultimately have a serious impact upon his writing, and although he has continued to publish essays and reviews, there has been no new fiction.
Much of it has centered on nature and natural history, including books such as The Enigma of Stonehenge, Shipwreck and The Tree that feature text by Fowles in concert with beautiful photographs. Fowles has also collaborated on two stunning pictorial essays— Islands and Land —with photographer Fay Godwin.
The list of titles that Fowles has contributed forwards or afterwards to is lengthy, with highlights including The Book of Ebenezer Le Page an obscure British novel from the early s that he has championed , a version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Lost Domain a French novel that served as one of the inspirations for The Magus , and a book on Thomas Hardy.
Fowles has even edited a huge facsimile edition of the original manuscript of Monumenta Britannica, the first complete publication of notes and drawings by 17th century antiquary John Aubrey, whose work is considered essential to the understanding of British archeology.
Limited edition signed copies in slipcase were produced in both U. A special edition of The Ebony Tower featuring a signed tipped-in page was issued in a quantity of at the same time as the true first edition. And both Mantissa and A Maggot have been produced in the U. How is this book featured in the "most disturbing book ever written" AND "best books of the 20th century"? Also, is it PG stuff or would it be inappropriate for a high-school age person?
Stefania Lazar Because having disturbing content and being a good book are not mutually exclusive. I wouldn't go as far as calling it one of the best books of the 20 …more Because having disturbing content and being a good book are not mutually exclusive.
I wouldn't go as far as calling it one of the best books of the 20th century, but it was very well-written. The psychological abuse, the description of both the villain's and the victim's attitudes vs.
I'm not sure what PG means. The psychological abuse depicted here is pretty strong and the ending is veeery creepy. I think it would be too shocking for a 13 year-old kid. Hell, it shocked me a lot, and I've seen many seasons of Criminal Minds : year-olds, yes, maybe. Then again, it always depends on the kid. See all 5 questions about The Collector….
Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of The Collector. Apr 06, Brenna rated it really liked it.
Rather than go into the plot details I'd rather touch on the larger metaphors of the book in this review. Although the basic plot is chilling enough on its own A man kidnaps a beautiful and intelligent young girl the parts that truly disturbed me had to do more with what I believe Fowles was saying about modern culture and the rise of the middle class.
Though this book is decidedly "British" in many ways, I think the issues he raises are applicable to any society where a large middle class is Rather than go into the plot details I'd rather touch on the larger metaphors of the book in this review.
Though this book is decidedly "British" in many ways, I think the issues he raises are applicable to any society where a large middle class is created in a relatively short amount of time.
For me, this book is asking whether financial stability really leads to morality and more fulfilling lives as in Major Barbara or if perhaps we actually lose our souls once our bellies are fed. As some have mentioned in other reviews, Miranda is the stereotypical posh young artist.
Born rich, it's easy for her to dismiss the complaints of the lower classes while at the same time hurling scorn at the society that produced her.
I've met many people like Miranda especially during my Masters at Columbia School of the Arts where trust fund babies were the norm, I went to school with a Pulitzer heiress for goodness sake and usually found them boring and shallow, quick to namedrop an artist or recite tired rhetoric.
But as her story progressed I began to like her more and more; Miranda is extremely self-aware, and I sensed that given time, she would grow out of her naivety and become a truly amazing woman. She is only 20 after all, barely an adult, and for all her idealistic pretension she is trying to evolve and grow something that's can't be said for many of my Columbia peers. That's where the butterfly metaphor becomes even more apt; it's not just that she's a butterfly that Frederick has collected, it's what a butterfly represents: metamorphoses.
It's almost as if Frederick has trapped her right when she was about to break out of her cocoon, halting her true beauty right before she was about to spread her wings. Which brings me to Frederick as a stand-in for middle-class mediocrity. Reading this book, I was often reminded of the idea that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Frederick is indifferent to everything: art, war, sex, etc. The only thing he seems to respond to is a fleeting type of beauty, and all he wants to do with that beauty is possess it.
Not love it, not understand it, just possess it. Similarly, the rise of the middle class in America and the UK should have been a renaissance of ideas once our bellies were fed. In many ways it was the civil rights and feminist movements come to mind , but in others, like the rise of reality television, celebrity culture and punditry news, our success has just made us comfortable and indifferent to human suffering. We go on collecting pop music, techno gadgets, houses, cars, spouses, designer clothes, with no question or investigation as to why.
With the internet we have the opportunity to learn about anything and everything, for the first time in history the entire history of the world is available at our fingertips. Why then does misinformation and stupidity seem to be on the rise rather then the reverse? Why then are we becoming less literate rather than more? I agree with Miranda when she says art collectors are the worst offenders. The idea that art is merely an investment just like the idea that a house is merely an investment rather than a home you share your life in is abhorrent to me.
I could never stand to look at an ugly painting in my home just because it was worth money, nor could I ever live with myself if I hoarded Picassos or Bacons or Kirchners purely for my own benefit.
Because the true lover of beauty and not all beauty is beautiful as Bacon proves wants to share that beauty with the world. They want everyone to see, hear, taste, feel, and enjoy that beauty so that others lives may be enriched as well.
They want everyone to feel as passionately as they do about what they love, but more importantly they just want others to feel. View all 29 comments. I read this when I was very young. Young enough that anything with a sexual connotation was interesting to me.
Even really perverse deviations like this. A collector of butterflies 'collects' a girl and holds her prisoner. His deviation is far deeper than merely sex. But of course, sex is implied all the time. There are two sorts of kept women, those gold-diggers who actively sought it, and those trophy wives who had never planned for it and had been actively courted. This is a trophy wife by for I read this when I was very young. This is a trophy wife by force, not a sex slave but a 'wife'.
It's a very original story, writing at it's finest. And it's creepy, very very creepy. There are a lot of excellent reviews on GR about this book, but in my opinion they all give far too much away. The book is like an onion. The outside skin, then the world within, layer upon layer.
And at it's resolution, quite unexpectedly there is a tiny green shoot. Every detail you know about the story or the characters will take away a layer for you. View all 37 comments.
Fredrick is a clerk and butterfly collector who wins some money that lets him retire. Fredrick is lonely and has trouble getting along with others, the only people he really has are his aunt and cousin.
He watches an art student named Miranda who starts to become his obsession. When he suddenly has a lot of free time and money on his hands, his daydreams about Miranda turn dark and he plans to kidnap her and hold her hostage in the cellar of an old cottage he buys until she gets to know him and Fredrick is a clerk and butterfly collector who wins some money that lets him retire.
When he suddenly has a lot of free time and money on his hands, his daydreams about Miranda turn dark and he plans to kidnap her and hold her hostage in the cellar of an old cottage he buys until she gets to know him and falls in love with him. I really enjoyed the book personally, I liked the writing style and even though its about something macabre Fowles doesn't make it exploitative or gore-y to shock the reader.
A lot of the focus is on the characters change and development as well as their thought process through out. I think it's really well done, both the Fredrick and Miranda parts are distinct and feel like two separate people.
Everything unfolding the way it does felt so real too, the way Fredrick distances himself from what he's doing and tries to justify it, insisting he doesn't mean to do it until he does it even though everything is being meticulously planned. Also Miranda's conflicted feelings over Fredrick and her slow breakdown from living confined and alone. I originally read this book because I was listening to last podcast on the left which I recommend to anyone who likes cults or serial killers but isn't sensitive to jokes that may be considered offensive and they mention Leonard Lake being obsessed with the book.
I checked and there are multiple murders associated with the book and so I just wanted to see what about this book was causing all these people to feel like yes killing is great. Anyways the only thing I can come up with is that since the book was published in the s there wasn't as much about sadistic killers or people doing crimes like these out there so it appealed to them and Fowles does such a good job capturing a certain kind of personality in Fredrick that people really identified with it.
It also gave them a good model of how to escalate to the point of doing things like kidnapping and murdering because really in the book Fredrick just starts off by dreaming about it and it goes from there.
That's all I've got because view spoiler [ Fredrick never really hurts Miranda or forces her to do anything especially at first, he kind of just likes having her hide spoiler ] so I'm not sure why that would inspire Leonard Lake to want a slave that he can use for sex and to take care of the house? The author in interviews said that the book is about social class and money and I do see that much more clearly in the book than any message about how its a good idea to kidnap women.
I'm not sure how much I agree with the social commentary though probably because it has been decades since the book has been written. I do understand the point that money and idle time given to people can lead to them doing things they might not have otherwise but I don't think the class or money is the problem so much as the person themselves. View all 16 comments. Nov 30, Paul Bryant rated it really liked it. This is one of those boy meets girl, chloroforms her, throws her in the back of the van and stuffs her in his basement type stories.
Fred is the sweetest psycho ever! The kindest and most attentive! No slurping and grunting at all! This is a brilliant stroke by John Fowles and really messes with your mind. As does the whole book. After that things just go badly. View all 11 comments. Aug 09, Dana Ilie rated it it was amazing Shelves: classic-literature. I definitely think Book Readers should have this book on their shelf.
View all 17 comments. It's been hard for me to focus lately — gee, I wonder why? Over the past month, I've begun several books, lost interest, shelved them. Instead, I find myself studying grim news items and statistics, scrolling through memes on social media, staring blankly out my window onto empty streets and watching old black and white movies or TV shows I've missed over the past decade.
All while trying to work from home while I still have a job. Then I came across this book. I knew vaguely what it was about, having long ago seen the acclaimed movie adaptation starring Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar. About 50 pages in, I realized it was the perfect book to read in semi quarantine.
Ferdinand, a. Frederick, Clegg is a nondescript something clerk in London who collects butterflies and has one other obsession: Miranda, a young, attractive art student he's seen and stalked.
When he wins the pools the UK equivalent of the lottery , he decides to abduct Miranda and keep her in the house he's bought in the country, complete with highly secure cellar, which he's outfitted for the newest item in his collection. That's essentially the story.
Miranda tries to escape, of course, and Ferdinand tries to stop her. She requests items from town, including some things that could perhaps hint that she's that missing girl from the art college. Above all, she tries to find out what Ferdinand wants from her. What's so fascinating about John Fowles's first novel is that it has the outline of a thriller but it's really so much more.
While the first part of the book is told from Ferdinand's POV — Fowles is very good at getting inside the twisted mind of what we might call an "incel" today — the second switches to Miranda's POV, and it's here that the book gets really interesting. Miranda keeps a secret diary, and through her accounts of her time in the cellar we see different takes on scenes we've already witnessed.
Plus, she's got obsessions of her own, including a much older semi-famous artist. While it's easy to have sympathy for her in the first part — she's clearly a victim — things get more complicated when we read her thoughts about class, education, physical beauty and art in the second.
What makes this such an effective quarantine novel is how isolated and trapped Miranda feels, removed from her friends, her family, her home. She longs to breathe fresh air, look up into the sky. She misses even the simplest, most banal activities. Through her diary, you can also see how her entrapment has changed her feelings about life, art and freedom.
There are lots of literary references — to The Tempest , of course, with Miranda referring to Clegg as her Caliban — and Emma , but also to more contemporary books about other anti-social characters like The Catcher in the Rye and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. The discussions about art are thoughtful and engaging. This novel must have made a huge splash when it appeared in the s, decades before such fiction became a subgenre.
Based on this, I'm definitely going to seek out — and perhaps, um, collect — some of his other novels. View all 33 comments. Impotent sociopath kidnaps beautiful art student. Told partly from the sociopath's perspective. That's my jam! I should have loved this book! But something left me cold. I suppose it may have been all the bitching and complaining the beautiful art student did in her stupid diary. What a helpless twit! Not to imply that I'd be brave and cunning or anything In fact, I'm pretty sure I'd be a helpless twit as well.
But I'll be goddamned if I'd expect anyone to enjoy readi Impotent sociopath kidnaps beautiful art student. But I'll be goddamned if I'd expect anyone to enjoy reading the daily chronicles of what a helpless twit I'd been. The ending really made me smile, though. The creepy ending made it all worthwhile. Crazy fucker. Jan 25, Fabian rated it really liked it. This novel is over fifty years old!
Though its semi predictable, the end is nonetheless terribly terrific. That there are two strands of narrative is sometimes a revelation, sometimes an encumbrance like living through a terrible ordeal not once but twice!
Both psych This novel is over fifty years old! View 2 comments. So much for starting the year with a literary bang. This novel made me feel like a dud firework.
I didn't find it chilling or claustrophobic. Not once was I creeped out. It did however leave me feeling rather sad, after the glum ending. What I could really do without right now.
As soon as the narrative went from the perspective of the possessive kidnapper to the diary entries of the young woman held captive, I was starting to lose interest. Alright, to start off with anyway, I liked reading of h So much for starting the year with a literary bang. Alright, to start off with anyway, I liked reading of her attempts to outwit him and get away, but it just wore off eventually.
It may be a case of a decent book that I just happened to read at the wrong time, I don't know. I could think of only a few scenes between Sarah Woodruff and Charles Smithson in The French Lieutenant's Woman that did more for me than the whole of this novel did.
I was going for three stars, but considering I really struggled to finish it, it's more likely somewhere around two I'm afraid. As a first novel the writing was pretty good, and that is about all the positives I can give it.
I felt nothing for Frederick. Didn't feel pity for him. Of course I felt sorrow for Miranda. Poor girl. So, not a great reading experience at all for me. I can't say that I'm that interested in butterflies, but I would rather this had actually been about some nice lovely butterflies, and not feeling locked up.
I've had enough of that already! View all 20 comments. Thought by some to be the first psychological thriller, this book left me slightly wanting. The Collector is broken into three parts. The first part is from Clegg's point of view. Clegg is a man obsessed with a young woman and decides to "collect" her, much as he collects butterflies. The second part is from the woman's point of view, once she's been "collected".
This was the part that I found unsatisfying. There were some observations in this section about class, money and society wh 3. There were some observations in this section about class, money and society which probably were more pertinent in the 60's, which is when this book was written , than they are now.
I found this portion slowed down the pacing considerably. The third part goes back to Clegg's point of view. Clegg is where this book lives. The peeks inside his mind, while presented as normal thoughts on his part, are truly chilling to us readers who are sane. I shivered to read some of the things he was thinking.
These psychological tics and the detached way in which they were presented were what made this book great. You can see how I'm torn here between being unsatisfied, while at the same time finding some portions of The Collector to be outstanding. To today's jaded horror readers? This might not be the book for you. But to fans of stories like Silence of the Lambs, or even Red Dragon, I think this book will appeal, even though some of the themes are a bit outdated.
It's to them that I recommend The Collector. Shelves: recs-mom , eek-the-creepies , owned-ebook , full-of-wonderful , unreliable-narrators. He wants me living-but-dead. He makes preparations by buying a house out in the country, purchasing assorted objects and things he knows she will need, convinced that if he can only capture her and keep her that she will slowly grow to love him. The first part of the novel was told from Frederick's point of view and it was rather alarming at his thought process.
He is convinced that Miranda will start to love him after some time. However, when she wakes up, she confronts him with his actions. Clegg is embarrassed and promises to let her go after a month. He promises to show her "every respect", pledging not to sexually molest her and to shower her with gifts and the comforts of home, on one condition: she can't leave the cellar. The second part of the novel is narrated by Miranda in the form of fragments from a diary that she keeps during her captivity.
Miranda reminisces over her previous life throughout this section of the novel; and many of her diary entries are written either to her sister or to a man named G. Miranda reveals that G. At first, Miranda thinks that Clegg has sexual motives for abducting her; but, as his true character begins to be revealed, she realises that this is not true. She begins to pity her captor, comparing him to Caliban in Shakespeare's play The Tempest because of his hopeless obsession with her.
Clegg tells Miranda that his first name is Ferdinand eventual winner of Miranda's affections in The Tempest.
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