Word: clegg
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...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...
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...
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...