The Scapegoat (Virago Modern Classics)

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The Scapegoat is the first film production [1] for Sarah Beardsall and Dominic Minghella's production company, Island Pictures. [2] Filming on The Scapegoat began in London in November 2011. [3] According to Robert Osborne of Turner Classic Movies, the original choice for Barratt / De Gué was Cary Grant, but Daphne du Maurier insisted on Guinness because he reminded her of her father, actor Gerald du Maurier. [4] John learns that Maurice Duval, former head of the glassworks, was killed during the German Occupation. Marie-Noel goes missing and everyone but Françoise searches for her. When she's found in the well at the glassworks, John discovers that Jean murdered Duval and threw his body in the well, accusing him of being a Nazi collaborator. Marie-Noel climbed down the well as an act of penitence on behalf of her father. John also learns that Blanche had a relationship with Duval.

The Scapegoat is a British film adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's 1957 novel of the same name. The drama is written and directed by Charles Sturridge and stars Matthew Rhys as lookalike characters John Standing and Johnny Spence. It was broadcast on ITV on 9 September 2012. Du Maurier’s skill creates as much suspense in The Scapegoat as it did in Rebecca. Her characters are linked by dependency, hostilely, old hatreds, and money. Carefully, John listens and digests remarks, cautious not to denounce the absent Jean and so reveal himself to this accepting family. Off to join my group and read what others are saying! A book so much richer than many of the newer fiction books I often read. Just sayin! so do you, and Renée, and the woman in Villars". I didn't answer her"' (p.283). Jean's mother concludes by saying 'You've got what you wanted, haven't you?'

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One had no right to play with other people's lives. One should not interfere with their emotions. A word, a look, a smile, a frown, did something to another human being, waking response or aversion, and a web was woven which had no beginning and no end, spreading outward and inward too, merging, entangling, so that the struggle of one depended on the struggle of the other." My realisation that all I had ever done in life, not only in France but in England also, was to watch people, never to partake in their happiness or pain, brought such a sense of overwhelming depression, deepened by the rain stinging the windows of the car, that when I came to Le Mans, although I had not intended to stop there and lunch, I changed my mind, hoping to change my mood.” It is an old-fashioned, psychologically excavated classic in its almost fantastic organization. I do not reveal the end in other novels or short stories by Daphne du Maurier because there is a final twist. And it wants to exchange identities with us. And totally assimilate our innocence into its own cynical essence. Throughout the book, I was forced to revise my opinions once or twice about what was really going on. If everything in the book is supposed to be taken literally, then we need to suspend belief at times: could two men really be so identical that even their mother, wife and daughter can't tell the difference? There is also another way to interpret the story, one which goes deeper into the psychology of identity - I won't say any more about that here, but if you read the book this theory may occur to you too. I found the book very thought provoking.

What would you do if you came face to face with yourself? That's what happens to John, an Englishman on holiday in France, when he meets his exact double - a Frenchman called Jean de Gue. John agrees to go for a drink with Jean but falls into a drunken stupor and wakes up in a hotel room to find that Jean has disappeared, taking John's clothes and identity documents with him! This classic gem is a piece of riveting. edge-of-your-seat suspense in the best tradition of the Queen of Cliffhangers. Further, his love for the real Jean de Gué's family and his distaste for the man's apparent selfishness is shared by the reader. His discomfort at the circumstances in which he finds himself, and his willing collaboration with the deception, causes not judgement from the reader; rather, we wish him success in the plans he sets in motion, thereby exposing our own active entanglement in his scheme also.There's a fair amount of suspension of disbelief that is required on the part of the reader, but du Maurier is so skilled at engaging us, there were very few times that I stopped or scratched my head. I was only too happy to be along for the ride. The way she slowly reveals information is well timed, a natural unfolding. It’s also beautifully written. I’ve never seen du Maurier better at the incidental metaphor, descriptions of people and places, and above all subtle and precise descriptions of how John feels and responds. Daphne du Maurier had the idea for The Scapegoat when she was in France in 1955, to research the lives of her ancestors, the Busson-Mathurins, who were glass-blowers. She did subsequently write the novel for which she intended this research, entitling it "The Glassblowers" (1963). But before writing it, she became distracted by a number of incidents that happened to her in France, which inspired the plot of The Scapegoat, published in 1957. She apparently wrote it at record speed, finishing within six months, and then collapsed with nervous exhaustion. Even the structure of this one sentence gives the impression of hurtling towards doom. It does not let up; there is no break. Another instance provides part of the novel's setting. Houses often seem to take on a life of their own in Daphne du Maurier's novels. For example, "Manderley" in "Rebecca", seems to be imbued with as much of a presence - to be as much a character - as any of the actual people in the book. Indeed in her own life, she seems to have had an almost obsessive love for her "Menabilly" the house she rented for so many years. Here in France, as part of her research, Daphne du Maurier discovered a house that had belonged to one of her ancestors two hundred years earlier. Exploring the derelict buildings, she saw fragments of the glass they had made, still there, scattered by the wind. She used these impressions and experiences, drawing on them to create an atmospheric, dramatic suspense novel, set in France.

She imagined herself suddenly transported into their midst, listening to their conversation, perhaps even becoming one of them," Yet another Daphne du Maurier book that I struggled... to put down! French language academic John is astonished to bump into his exact doppelganger at a provincial French train station.Jean is a 'devil' but Béla replies: 'he's not a devil. He's a human, ordinary man, just like yourself' (p.364). She tells him that 'you've