The Scapegoat (Virago Modern Classics)

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Gee, I got so many likes when I was just having a whinge, I don't know why I'm bothering to write a review! 😁 While contemporary writers were dealing critically with such subjects as the war, alienation, religion, poverty, Marxism, psychology and art, and experimenting with new techniques such as the stream of consciousness, du Maurier produced 'old-fashioned' novels with straightforward narratives that appealed to a popular audience's love of fantasy, adventure, sexuality and mystery. At an early age, she recognised that her readership was comprised principally of women, and she cultivated their loyal following through several decades by embodying their desires and dreams in her novels and short stories.

filled with an intense desire to get away from that dingy, shabby hotel and never set eyes on it again, and as my anger rose and self-disgust took possession of me..."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!

Anyone that has ever hungered to be a part of a group, but yet always felt as a stranger, will relate to John here. What should happen, however, if you had the opportunity to take someone’s place? Would you do it? When John bumps into an exact likeness of himself in a tavern, he is given precisely this chance. While John is a lonely man with a feeling of emptiness inside, Comte Jean de Gué claims to have only the problem of having too many ‘human’ possessions. Jean wants to play a clever game – that of switching identities with John and assuming each other’s lives. When John wakes the next morning, stripped of his own clothes and everything he had on his person, what choice does he have but to put on another man’s clothes, take his suitcase and assume this new life? The ending she refers to comes across to the reader as quite weak. It provides neither the delicious twist we have learnt to expect from this author, nor the massive ambiguity she can do so well. Clearly from this letter though, it is what she intended, and perhaps had to wrestle with internally herself. Perhaps after all it is a fitting ending to a novel, in which she delved into John/Jean's - and possibly her own - psyche and explored other, imaginary selves. Did she explore mere fantasies, or their secret lives? Increasingly after this novel, she became intrigued by what she called the "dark side" of our natures, and some of her best short stories and novellas, explore this theme. "Don't Look Now", "The Blue Lenses", and "The Breakthrough", are examples. They too are macabre and strange, tense and chillingly unexpected tales, relying on the same speculative atmosphere of suspense and mystery, both disturbing and uncanny. 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! On another occasion, when the reader is finally about to learn the truth about the mysterious Maurice Duval, Wonderful story, well acted by all involved, particularly Matthew Rhys in the dual role as the gentle John and the aggressive Johnny, who is only out for himself. At the end, his mother's nursemaid (Phoebe Nichols) has some words of wisdom. I love the ending.I wondered how it would look at nightfall, this town of Villars, turning early to sleep and silence like all provincial market towns, the inhabitants behind their shutters and in bed, the houses in shadow, the mellow roofs sloping to pitchy eaves, the flamboyant Gothic spire of the cathedral church stabbing an ink-blue sky; no sound, perhaps, but the passing footstep of a loiterer homeward bound and the hardly perceptible ripple of the canals still and dark beside the walls". John makes a rapid decision, not to protest but to step into a different life. Quite unexpectedly, and almost inadvertently, he has many of the things he always wanted, though not in the way he had thought he might gain those things, and in a way that is rather difficult to handle. Ti Zui yang, Chinese, 2010. Translated by Dafuni Dumuli’ai zhu, Zhao Yongjian and Yu Mei yi and published by Shanghai wen yi chu ban she Jean vs John both of their appearances are the same and both speak relatively the same in voice. French vs English. High society life vs dull drum life. Family of complexity vs no Family. So why not take advantage of the situation and switch lives!

The story takes place over one very intense week, in which everything changes. The details are wonderful—daily life, the house and food, and the characters of Jean’s family, all of whom have secrets. This is a book about getting what you want and coping with it, about identity, about belonging. John is a colorless man forced to take on color and animation—a man forced into life. I wondered how much further I had to fall, and if the sense of shame that overwhelmed me was merely wallowing in darkness... I had played the coward long enough." John is regarded as the male counterpart of the second Mrs. De Winter in Rebecca. I can see where that idea is coming from. Strangely enough, The Scapegoat did not attract the same attention, although it is just as powerful a story.The novel hurtles to its conclusion, within its short compressed time-frame, as John desperately tries to right the wrongs as he sees them. Increasingly he is more committed, yet contrarily also more unsure,

As with many of Daphne du Maurier's novels, there are so many elements of mystery that it is sometimes rather like reading a detective story. She often drops hints to the reader; clues carefully planted so that the reader is able to puzzle out the various roles and relationships before the viewpoint character John does. We suspect Renée's behaviour, for example, before John seems to have an inkling of why she seems so overly flirtatious and petulant. And we know who the woman Béla in the neighbouring village of Villars must be. Seven days is all John got but what was accomplished in those seven days was remarkable changes for the whole family of Comte de Gué of St. Gilles and the family business of Verrerie (glass-work) and which all members reside in the stately Chateau.

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. It is my story, and it is Moper's [Tommy her husband] also. We are both doubles. So it is with everyone. Every one of us has his, or her, dark side. Which is to overcome the other? This is the purpose of the book. And it ends, as you know, with the problem unsolved, except that the suggestion there, when I finished it, was that the two sides of that man's nature had to fuse together to give birth to a third..."