From that moment on, his daydreams and wild fantasies become serious plans he decorates the cellar and is ready to catch his butterfly-victim Miranda. One day, Frederick wins a prize in the football pools and decides to buy a lonely and old countryside house. Perhaps that was when it all started.”Ĭatherine Deneuve in UK filming 1965 British psychological horror Repulsion, London, Friday 2nd October 1964. Once I let myself dream I hit her across the face as I saw it done once by a chap in a telly play. Those were days I let myself have the bad dreams.

Other days the sweetness of these innocent daydreams takes a darker tone when he sees her spending time with other men, for he, naturally, wants her all for himself, even though Miranda doesn’t even know he exists: “ The only times I didn’t have nice dreams about her being when I saw her with a certain young man, a loud noisy public-school type who had a sports car. She all pretty with her pale blonde hair and grey eyes and of course the other men all green round the gills.” It was always she loving me and my collection, drawing and colouring them working together in a beautiful modern house in a big room with one of those huge glass windows meetings there of the Bug Section, where instead of saying almost nothing in case I made mistakes we were the popular host and hostess. She drew pictures and I looked after my collection (in my dreams). Nothing nasty, that was never until what I’ll explain later. His early daydreams about her are very romantic and sweet, but concerning in their delusional nature: “ I used to have daydreams about her, I used to think of stories where I met her, did things she admired, married her and all that. He is a socially awkward, strange individual and it’s hard to decide whether he is good or bad the things he does are bad, but his intentions truly are not.

Frederick isn’t the Arnold Layne from Pink Floyd’s song, stealing and collecting girls knickers from the washing lines in suburban gardens of Cambridge, but he is a collector of other things firstly the butterflies, and then one beautiful girl called Miranda he watches from afar and over time falls in love with, despite not knowing anything about her really, apart of the Art School she goes to and what she looks like. I was captivated from the very first page because from the very beginning Fowles places the reader into the mind of a seemingly ordinary, yet very unusual individual named Frederick Clegg. I discovered this novel by serendipity, completely randomly, but it turned out that this was exactly the kind of novel I craved.

I read quite a few interesting novels lately, but John Fowles’ debut novel “The Collector”, published in May 1963, is the most peculiar one both the theme and the style in which it was written are fascinating.

Vintage fowles the collector