Frederick is a very shy working-class butterfly collector obsessed with this young woman Miranda. One day, he wins a huge prize and becomes wealthy. From then on he starts fantasizing about kidnapping Miranda until the day he does it. He presumes that if she can slowly learn to know him then she will love him. He locks her up in the cellar of his house, brings her all she wants and never sexually attacks her. Their relationship follows Miranda’s mood, sometimes seducing, sometimes aggressive. The first part of the book is narrated by Frederick, and the second part is by Miranda, reflecting on her life before her imprisonment. In the end, Miranda dies of pneumonia, and Frederick just buries her in the garden and starts dreaming about kidnapping another woman. Quite a sordid story with no redemption in the end.
“I’ve been sitting here and thinking about God. I don’t think I believe in God any more. It is not only me, I think of all the millions who must have lived like this in the war. The Anne Franks. And back through history. What I feel I know now is that God doesn’t intervene. He lets us suffer. If you pray for liberty then you may get relief just because you pray, or because things happen anyhow which bring you liberty. But God can’t hear. There’s nothing human like hearing or seeing or pitying or helping about him. I mean perhaps God has created the world and the fundamental laws of matter and evolution. But he can’t care about the individuals. He’s planned it so some individuals are happy, some sad, some lucky, some not. Who is sad, who is not, he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care. So he doesn’t exist really.”
Read and listened to as an audiobook