When Lladro Attacks

Thank god for the British obsession with class and socioeconomic status, because it's the one thing that keeps John Fowles' The Collector from being scarier than you really want it to be.

I mean — and it could just be me — but it can be a teensy-weensy bit difficult to gear yourself up to read a story about a butterfly-collecting pervo-weirdo named Frederick who kidnaps a young art student, Miranda, and imprisons her in his basement. Truth be told, I tend to prefer stories where precocious young girls get raped by men dressed as birds. But the premise of The Collector is a little creepy.

Thankfully, there's a handy indictment of middle class British values ca. the early 1960s that makes it easier to see this bitch get chloroformed. And by "bitch getting chloroformed" I mean "chloroformed bitch" in the sense that the character of Miranda functions as an allegorical stand-in for middle class artistic aspiration and generalized professional-managerial banality. (See, I, unlike some people, can differentiate between an actual human and a mere allegorical one; when allegories are outlawed, only outlaws will use allegories.) That's at least part of what made the story easier to stomach — over and over Fowles' characters dance around the topic of class and who has it and who can't buy it, even after winning the lottery, as Frederick the Collector does.

There's some Big Idea about art in Collector that also makes it easy to stomach the creepiness — Frederick collects butterflies and likes photography, pursuits Miranda believes suck the life out of their subjects (with entomology, literally sucking the life out of the subject) — unlike painting or whatever she does. So there's some kind of thing going on there with that. What all this stuff — the class stuff and the art stuff — really succeeds at is undercutting the aspects of the book that the back cover trumpets: Its utility as a "psychological thriller," a "horror story" or a "haunting" book.

That said, however, Fowles is really good at keeping a reader a little bit off balance and queasy. In my experience, kidnappings — especially ones involving crazy people — generally go badly. And until the story's end, you keep hoping that these generally sensible people can pull back from the brink and reintegrate themselves in polite society — which itself is kind of a ridiculous, funny premise — like you want these nice, upstanding, good British people to pull away from craven, hideous sin and return to a world of clotted cream and baps, or some other really cute sounding word for foodstuffs.

There's a moment that captures this idea perfectly — I can't find it quickly enough — where Miranda tries reasoning with her captor that everything could be cool, that everyone can pack up and go home, everything could return to normal and no one would be the wiser if he just let her go then. It's funny and very British sounding and yet when you're reading it, you really, really want Frederick to take her up on the offer and let her go. That part is done really well.

I am getting ready to spoil an ending, at least as far as the suspenseful part of this book is concerned, so be warned . . . anyway, another part I liked about The Collector is how snooty Miranda is written, and how at the end there's a snide little coda where Frederick discovers his next "guest," and she is just a shopgirl — which is to say, in my mind, that Frederick never appreciated Miranda's great talent and culture, perhaps because it was only there in Miranda's mind; we assume she's a real "la-di-la" lady (as Frederick sneered at one point) but we only think so because she tells us so in her journal entries. It's smart that way.

Spencer, who chose The Collector, says that he read it for ninth grade English class. I think I read Nectar in a Sieve in ninth grade English class. Which is to say, Who teaches this book in ninth grade? (Well, here's a plug for teaching it in high school).

Other than that, George Paston was the actual pen name of an actual writer but I have no idea what it all means.

Also — I suppose I should add that this next part deserves a spoiler alert — Jen was wondering if you could really die after a month of no light. I had no idea, but I definitely worried for Miranda while she was stuck in the basement. I Googled it and it seemed like a remote possibility. It's not good, that's for sure, allegory or no.