Books: Caliban Revisited

THE COLLECTOR by John Fowles. 305 pages. Little, Brown. $4.95.

In today’s literature, the devil cannot be found. He is everywhere and he is nowhere; for there are few modern evils that have not. been justified in the name of some higher good. In this superb first novel by John Fowles, 37, a schoolteacher in London, evil has seldom found quite so many excuses for itself and for that reason has seldom been so sinister.

Arabian Nights. Frederick Clegg never admits to a crude thought! He is one of England’s New People, the upwardly mobile lower classes. A post office clerk, he has a harmless hobby: collecting butterflies. He lives in his dreams, especially one about a pretty girl, Miranda Grey, who is everything he is not: gay, warm and perceptive. “The dream began where she was being attacked by a man,” Clegg thinks to himself in his flat, monotonous manner, “and I ran up and rescued her. Then somehow I was the man that attacked her, only I didn’t hurt her; I captured her and drove off to a remote house and there I kept her captive in a nice way. Gradually, she came to know me and like me, and the dream grew into the one about our living in a nice modern house, married, with kids and everything.”

One day Clegg wins a small fortune in a football pool and his dream of confused chivalry becomes a possibility. Not knowing what to do with his money (he is intimidated by waiters, salesmen and humanity in general), he decides to use it to net Miranda—like a butterfly. He buys a secluded house with a hidden room in the cellar. One night he lies in wait for Miranda, chloroforms her and whisks her off to his cellar to be his “guest.”

Miranda expects to be murdered or raped. But her gangling, awkward captor blushes at the slightest hint of indecency. He assures her he just wants her to love him. He seldom lets her out of her room, and then only after he has bound and gagged her. But he heaps her with presents: expensive foods, dresses, a phonograph. When she asks for some perfume, he brings her 14 bottles. “It’s like living in The Arabian Nights,” Miranda muses in bewilderment. “Being the favorite in the harem. But the perfume you really want is freedom.”

Reduced to a Specimen. Miranda is full of emotions, and she tries them all on Clegg to win her release. She wheedles, she sympathizes, she fasts, she taunts him; but his response is always a numbing impassivity. He is too self-absorbed to follow an argument, too repressed to allow himself an emotion. Miranda tries to teach him something about art and music, but with typical self-pity he says he cannot appreciate them because he was not brought up with her advantages. Gradually it dawns on Miranda that Clegg is a modern version of Caliban—”anti-life, antiart, anti-everything.” And she is his possession: “I am one in a row of specimens. It’s when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I’m meant to be dead, always the same, always beautiful. My being alive and changing and having a separate mind and having moods was becoming a nuisance.”

In desperation, Miranda offers him her body. But he proves completely impotent and is now doubly resentful: she has betrayed the pure girl of his dreams. Eventually, he lets her die in a peculiarly hideous way—an act, the reader comes to feel, that he intended all along without ever admitting it to himself. For his conscience is always clear: “I know what some would think; they would think my behaviour peculiar. I know most men would only have thought of taking an unfair advantage and there were plenty of opportunities. I could have used the chloroform, done what I liked. But I am not that sort, definitely not that sort at all. What she never understood was that with me it was having. Having her was enough. Nothing needed doing. I just wanted to have her, and safe at last.”

Fowles got the idea for his plot from a true incident in 1957 when a young Englishman kidnaped a girl and kept her prisoner for 105 days before she was rescued. This kind of perversion is not generally the stuff of high tragedy, but Fowles has made it so. Clegg is the perfect embodiment of modern evil: dull, implacable, without compassion because he is always rationalizing his cruelty. The evil he does is all the more agonizing because his victim is so engagingly brimful of life; and Clegg is so heedless of individual life that before the novel ends he is already mulling over the choice of another victim.