In "Rebecca", the episode where the new wife accidentally destroys a valuable china ornament given to her predecessor (Rebecca) on her marriage, and becoming a particular favourite, is powerfully symbolic. He goes from having no life or ties to being responsible for the complexities of a chateaux and the lives that revolve around it, and he finds out that the life he has assumed is one of a dubious and sometimes cruel individual. A story that examines identity and fate in a thoughtful way, written in the author's elegant but provoking pen. I’d never read a book by Daphne du Maurier before so I wasn’t sure quite which I'd get - the overblown or the stilted - but I was confident the plot would be asinine. The novel certainly gives the reader food for thought but, from my point of view, something is missing in the story.

Memo to myself: don’t be so dismissive of books written before I was born – I can learn much from them and the medicine to cure my phobia is simple enough, seek out my next one PDQ. He is so unloved and disconnected that he can assume another man’s life and involve himself immediately in the other man’s world to the point of burying himself inside the other man’s skin. He loved history, he earned his living as a lecturer, and though he worked diligently to ensure that his lectures were scholarly, precise and engaging, he was sure that he could never fully convey the glory of his subject. Archives Archives Tags Art Biography Book List Book Review Books Book Tag Classical Music Classics Debut Novel Detective Fiction Fantasy Fiction French Literature Historical Fiction History Horror Italian Literature Japan Japanese Books Japanese Literature Literary Fiction Music Mystery Non-Fiction Novella Paintings Philip K.It is frustrating to feel this way about a book by an author, whose books I've esteemed so far, and every negative feeling is penned here with a very heavy heart. When she wrote about the character Françoise needing a blood transfusion, in real life shortly afterwards, her daughter Tessa gave birth to a son who needed two blood transfusions.

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. I dragged myself to my feet, and with my hell-hound in tow started off once more through the vastness of the wood, feeling, as the poet did before me, that my companion would be with me through the nights and through the days, and down the arches of the years, and I should never be rid of him. Again, less gothic, but satisfying (although I must say, it left me quite curious as to what followed the final page). As the days pass, we find out, along with John, who is who in the large family of Jean ('Monsieur le Comte'), the relationships between them and the past events that led to the present state of affairs.However, as time passes, John starts to change the pre-determined script and acts out of character (as he is clearly not Jean). And another biographer, Margaret Forster, reprints a letter, which Daphne du Maurier wrote in the same year of The Scapegoat's publication, 1957, just after her (Daphne's) husband Tommy had had a nervous breakdown. Previously somewhat shy and leading an uneventful life, John is unexpectedly thrust into the very limelight of life, acquiring a big family overnight, but also overbearing responsibilities and a failing business. It’s a pity this suffers from the slow ending as Rebecca does, because that was one of my biggest critiques of Rebecca, but I’m really curious to read this book after reading your review. He is certainly going to have his hands full as there is much to do if he is to right this particular ship.