Word: clegg
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...novel, a core sampling from that vein of irrational hostility that separates servants from masters, haves from havenots, Britain's John Fowles explored the miasmal psychology of an impotent, whey-faced nonentity named Clegg. A municipal clerk whose warped dreams brutally but clearly mock the aspirations of the newly affluent New People of the English working class, Clegg collects butterflies in his off-hours until he wins $200,000 in the football pool and can suddenly indulge his wildest fancies. He buys a remote country house, converts its vaulted cellar into a more or less gilded cage, and kidnaps...
Stamp plays Clegg more as a psychotic Adonis. The winsome boyish airs that made him a perfect choice for the movie version of Billy Budd (1962) are a crucial drawback when he has to reason maniacally: "There'd be a bloomin' lot more of this if enough people had the time and money." His fixed stare and halting accents never quite cancel out the suspicion that he is just the sort of menace a comely bird might yearn to be imprisoned by-a vaguely Heathcliffian introvert reviving a Brontë romance in modern dress. Thus Actress Eggar dominates...
...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...