Rating: 
Summary: Quite Brilliant
Review: A terrific first novel by a truly talented writer
Rating:
Summary: The Collector
Review: Ferdinand is a quiet, mild mannered clerk who has recently come into a large amount of money. Unsure what to do with it, at first he wanders about Europe with his deformed Aunt Mabel and his prim and proper Aunt Annie, satisfying their desires to be rich and cultured, but not his. They travel to Australia and he attempts to figure out what to do with his life. He has no friends, no social skills, and no desire to better himself through education, culture or life experiences. All he cares about is his butterflies, which he collects with obsessive meticulousness, and with being proper and respectful, not at all 'immoral like most nowadays'.Miranda is a young art student brimming with ideas and thoughts, creativity and wit. She is graceful and beautiful, with many friends, and has a close relationship with an almost caricature pretentious art-snob of a man, GP. Her world is full of color and vibrancy, she wishes to experience everything, to learn everything, and most of all, she wishes to escape the small minded 'New People' way of life that so encompasses the existence of everyone she grew up with. Through her paintings - youthful and young, she will admit, but alive! - she strives to learn about the world she has been thrust into, not to reject it but to embrace. Having open eyes is, to her, the greatest of all gifts. She goes to a college near where Ferdinand lives in London. He first noticed her at work, her house was right opposite the Annexe, but after he wins some money, he begins to follow her about, learning the patterns of her daily life, where she works, where she studies, who her friends are. On a whim, Ferdinand purchases a house with an intricate cellar far out in the country-side, miles away from anywhere. Telling himself he would never use it, he sets about making the cellar all but impenetrable with locks and bolts and sound-proofing. He buys furniture and women's clothing, and tries his hardest to break out of the cellar he has created to see if it is possible. Satisfied it isn't, he takes the next step and captures Miranda, locking her in the cellar until she can learn to love him as he loves her. Forty pages into the novel we have a kidnapped woman, a love-obsessed man, and two cellar rooms. First, we are thrust through the experience of Miranda's capture through Ferdinand's hopeless eyes, with his yearning love and his down-trodden way of thinking about himself. It is plain, to him, that he is the only man - no, the only person - ever capable of loving Miranda the way she deserves, and all he wishes is to show her this truth. He is chilling in his politeness: making her breakfast every morning - whatever she wants! - buying her nice things, having coffee with her, chatting, talking, letting her paint for him. He is also incredibly thorough, thwarting the few escape attempts she makes at the start with ease. All he wants is love, to be able to love her, and to know she loves him. The second part of the novel is Miranda's diary. She is a wonderful woman: Alive, energetic, intelligent, exploratory - a true modern woman. Through her diary we learn of her friends, her passions, her interesting relationship with GP, and more. She begins to consider her captivity to be a positive experience in how it is changing her way of thinking, and she desperately pities Ferdinand - her 'Caliban', she calls him, echoing the hopeless love of Caliban for Miranda in the Shakespearean play 'The Tempest'. The novel ends as it should, heart breaking and sad. Throughout, we learn a great deal about the two characters, developing a sad, hopeless pity-love for Ferdinand much like Miranda does, and we love Mirand for who she is. It ends on a chilling note, a tone of unbelievable inhumanity, but no less satisfying for that. One of the best books I have read this year.
Rating:
Summary: Rivetting!
Review: Two viewpoints make one series of events seem as different as day and night. Moreover, just as the day view has its dark despairs, the night view has its own eerie lights. This is an intelligent psychological thriller that does not depend upon gore to send chills up your spine.
Rating:
Summary: One story, two views.
Review: Rivetting! Two viewpoints make one series of events seem as different as day and night. Moreover, just as the day view has its dark despairs, the night view has its own eerie lights. This is an intelligent and believable psychological thriller that does not depend upon cheap gore to send a chill up the spine.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely chilling!
Review: I'll start by saying I had to read this book for school, so I was not expecting to enjoy it - what a surprise I was in for!
This book is one of the most chilling, confronting and thought-provoking books I have read. The great thing about this book is that the story is told from several different perspectives so the reader is able to examine it from more than one angle. The language used is also quite plain, which gives the reader more of an opportunity to examine the themes of the book closely without getting bogged down in overly verbose language.
I won't give away the story, except to say that we get a great insight into the twisted mind of the protagonist, as he searches for love in his own creepy way. I actually felt quite sorry for poor Frederick.
This book is very creepy but in a fun way. If you're looking for a novel that's dark a and challenging exploration of the tortured mind, you've found it!
Read it now!
Rating:
Summary: Beauty, class consciousness and obsessive love
Review: Alienated, impotent council clerk and amateur butterfly collector Fred Clegg, 25, wins the pools. Within weeks he's quit his job, farewelled his oppressive aunt and spastic cousin on a long trip to Australia, and set about converting a Sussex cellar into a prison for Miranda Grey, the 20 year-old art student he's been ardently admiring since she was in boarding school. Fowles' startlingly accomplished first novel begins as an exploration of what happens to a man when the controlling pressure of living in the everyday world is lifted by money, giving him both the power and the idleness to follow his dark fantasies to fruition. But that all happens in the first twenty-odd pages. Fowles is more interested in what happens next - how the captive and the captor get on. With that in mind, the novel soon morphs into something more sustainable and actually far more interesting: it's ultimately an exploration of obsessive love, British class consciousness, and their connection to two conflicting understandings of beauty - is it something that can be captured and admired, or is it something that must be lived and allowed to live, because to capture it is to snuff it out? Fowles cleverly builds his case by offering two perspectives on the events - Fred's blunt retrospective, and Miranda's diary which she secrets under the mattress in her basement prison. Fred's account is polite, reserved, and plagued by self-consciousness; Miranda's is effusive, filled with escape plots, speculations, memories and artistic and literary parallels (Shakespeare's "Tempest" and Austen's "Emma" feature prominently). Fowles' novel not only takes us inside the minds of a psychopath and his victim, but also into the heart of mid-century Britain with its embarrassed bourgeoisie, elitist creative "few", and the hideous New People - the tasteless new rich whom Miranda and her philandering hero, the artist G.P., credit with the destruction of everything good in the world. It's in this kind of critical sociology that Fowles' real concern lies, I suspect, but he wraps it in an ice-cold thriller which makes it never less than totally compelling.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: Fowles is a genius. The reader is initially guided by the mind of the deranged butterfly collector. It is only through his perspectives that we determine what happens, what he makes of love and reality. But Fowles then allows us to read the diary of thoughts of the collector's captive, Miranda. The two perspectives meld together to form a terrifying, clever novel you won't be able to put down.
Rating:
Summary: Too real.
Review: This book does not have the elements of a horror book. Yet it scares me every time I read it (I never get scared by books).
It is set up in the form of 3 accounts of diaries. You see the crime and the evolvement between the criminal and the victim
in their notes. The feelings are so real that I could not help but wonder if John Fowles did the things in the book, or he found the true diaries. That is what makes it so disturbing. I've always wondered how people are frightened by horror books about demons, zombies and dolls that come alive. This is as real as it gets, and also you get the best look into obsession gone very wrong and the desperation of freedom, in a straight forward, authentic manner. What more can one ask for?
Rating: 
Summary: still scary
Review: This book is still scary - even after all these years. Though it proves how much of a debt Thomas Harris has to Fowler in "Silence of the Lambs" and his other best selling thrillers, Fowler really comes out on top. Clegg is so much more frightening than Hannibal because there's nothing larger-than-life about him. He's so very average. That's what's so disturbing here - he could be anyone - you wouldn't look twice at him if he passed you on the street. Hannibal, on the other hand, would be a fantastic party guest - if you didn't end up on the menu, yourself.
Miranda is a heartbreaking victim. If only she weren't so annoying and priggish. My only real problem with the book is Fowler's insistence that social class is what seperates his two characters. However, it's really something more subtle - what is it in Clegg that allows him to do all these selfish things to Miranda without any real remorse or feeling? Miranda couldn't act this way to him - she can't even think of killing him in order to escape (she says otherwise to Clegg, but examine her actions with the axe). Fowler doesn't answer the question of what makes Clegg different - perhaps it can't be answered. However, I wish he had explored it a bit more than social class. Otherwise, this is a fascinating book - just don't expect to sleep much after finishing it.
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