The Collector

⚖The case for it

A butterfly collector wins the lottery, then spends it on a girl he means to keep the way he keeps his specimens. The objection has weight: Miranda's diary covers ground the first half already walked, and she can be a prig about who has earned an eye for beauty. Read her anyway. Fowles gives her a live, arguing intelligence set across the room from someone who treats a person as an acquisition. He holds that gap open, and the quiet that settles into it is what unsettles you.

— the honest librarian

✕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