The Collector by John Fowles

I was introduced to “The Collector” in an immensely weird way: a girl who fancied me (who I would later date for about two years) lent me her copy, a paperback edition from 1971 featuring a naked woman barely covered by her own arms, a camera, and a butterfly masking her face. She in turn was given this book as a gift from a person who fancied her, who had stolen it off the discount bookshelf they have at Tesco to raise money for charity. Looking back, that makes sense in a synchronistic, Jungian way. There is a love triangle in this book, a twisted one, as well, but with much worse outcomes.

I don’t want to spoil the plot, but it’s magnificent. Fowles manages to capture the pathetic, almost emasculated nature of an incel perfectly. To be more accurate, Frederick is a volcel, or voluntary celibate, who reveals to have paid a sex worker to get rid of his perceived stigma of virginity. An avid collector of butterflies, Frederick wins a large prize betting on football, al- lowing him to fulfil his lifelong fantasy of kidnapping a woman – he captures Miranda, a young woman at art college, and traps her in his newly bought house in Sussex.

The novel is disturbing. Frederick is portrayed so grimly, and the tension never eases. It’s also extremely sad. Miranda, in Frederick’s eyes, is at once objectified as part of his collection, and victimised as a woman through the deeply gendered violence he enacts on her. She is a Madonna before he meets her, untouched by the fact she is a human and not a clockwork object he can observe, until she isn’t anymore, and just becomes a Whore in his eyes. Fowles describes incel culture before incel culture was a thing. Perhaps it always was, and social media has only allowed incels to wallow in their own misery as a collective. Perhaps incels are themselves collectors of each other, choosing to reinforce their twisted perspectives rather than accept that you simply cannot collect or objectify women.

It is a great read, however. I loved it, and got a copy gifted to me for Christmas by that ex the very same year. She annotated it, and now my copy is almost ghoulish, as there are notes about very teenage perspectives of love in it, and in a way, that sort of reflects what incels and Frederick missed out on, by never escaping their shells. In another way, he himself is a butterfly, mounted in glass, never to change as a static object. It’s a tough book to review, precisely because one must read it themselves.