The Collector

⚖The case for it

A butterfly collector kidnaps a young art student and holds her in his cellar. Fowles gives us both perspectives: the kidnapper's pathetically self-justifying account, then the victim's diaries. A devastating study of class, obsession, and the violence latent in male possessiveness. More disturbing than any genre thriller because it is so clearly about England.

— the canon

✕The case against

Clegg's half is a hundred pages of mounting dread; Miranda's diary then rewinds and retells it at greater length, with long detours into her crush on a middle-aged painter and her lectures on art and the lower orders. Fowles meant the snobbery as evidence, but you still have to live inside it while the captivity grinds on.

— the honest librarian