I did not see the ending coming. I thought I knew how it was going to end…Dame du Maurier it appeared to me was right near the end leading me and other readers down the primrose path to the denouement. Not so fast. 😮 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. At one point halfway through the novel, John feels that he is trapped in a corner. He feels impotent, and that whatever he does will not work; he is sinking further and further into a morass of his own making. The author describes the scene outside the house,

I really wasn't expecting to get completely hooked to this story, but after a certain point that was exactly what happened and I didn't care about anything other than what was going to happen next at St. Gilles! Daphne du Maurier was obsessed with the past. She intensively researched the lives of Francis and Anthony Bacon, the history of Cornwall, the Regency period, and nineteenth-century France and England. Above all, however, she was obsessed with her own family history, which she chronicled in Gerald: A Portrait, a biography of her father; The du Mauriers, a study of her family which focused on her grandfather, George du Maurier, the novelist and illustrator for Punch; The Glassblowers, a novel based upon the lives of her du Maurier ancestors; and Growing Pains, an autobiography that ignores nearly 50 years of her life in favour of the joyful and more romantic period of her youth. Daphne du Maurier can best be understood in terms of her remarkable and paradoxical family, the ghosts which haunted her life and fiction.The story has been the basis of two films: one in 1959 starring Alec Guinness and Bette Davis and one in 2012 starring Matthew Rhys. The Scapegoat remains among the top six books that reflect Daphne du Maurier's "auctorial reputation" (Bakerman 12). The Scapegoat is favorable because du Maurier explored the impossibility of purging certain kinds of guilt" (Bakerman 14) as the book teaches "that even the most crass codes of behavior can generate redemptive action" (Bakerman 14). The Scapegoat is compared with Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel and The Flight of the Falcon as having a narrator facing their "most compelling experiences of their lives, often revealing some of their own baser actions and motivations" (Bakerman 22).

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.

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. I walked on through darkness, undergrowth and moss, and now I had no present and no past, the self who stumbled had no heart and mind..." 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? My sense of power was unbounded... I felt my bluff to be superb, and it must have worked... My self-confidence mounting every moment... I recalled my success the night before... little scraps of family history fell on my ear... what I gleaned would have to be sorted and sifted at leisure." Indeed there are at least two other contenders for the description of "scapegoat". Either the daughter or the wife could be seen in these terms. Marie-Noel seems over-eager to sacrifice herself for her father, as does Françoise, the Count's wife. The intensity of the little girl Marie-Noel's relationship with her father is clearly a reflection of that between the author, Daphne du Maurier, and her own father, the charismatic actor-manager Gerald du Maurier.

I could not ask for forgiveness for something I had not done. As scapegoat, I could only bear the fault.” 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." Immediately beside me was a gargoyle's head, ears flattened, slits for eyes, the jutting lips forming a spout for rain. The leaded guttering was choked with leaves, and when rain came the whole would turn to mud and pour from the gargoyle's mouth in a turbid stream... seeping down the walls, swirling in the runways, choking and gurgling above the gargoyle head, driving sideways like arrows to the windows, stinging the panes... there would be no other sound for hour after hour... but the falling rain, and the flood of leaves and rubble through the gargoyle's mouth."Theory is 'serves as an opportunity to explain failure or misdeeds, while maintaining one's positive self-image.' 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

Just as an actor paints old lines upon a young face, or hides behind the part he must create, so the old anxious self that I knew too well could be submerged and forgotten, and the new self would be someone without a care, without responsibility, calling himself Jean de Gué... " Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik. Daphne DuMaurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999. Print. 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! If only life were this simple. If only human relationships were straightforward, with little or no difficulties, no web of intricacies to disentangle. John, as the new Comte Jean de Gué, finds himself taking on a failing business and a family with secrets and complex feelings. John will come to know Jean through this family and his interactions with them. Jean may not be the kind of person our narrator would wish to emulate if given a choice. But isn’t he somehow responsible for these people now that he has allowed himself to be an accomplice to this deception? Does he want Jean to fail because he feels a victim in this charade? Perhaps John is Jean de Gué’s scapegoat, or maybe another is fulfilling this role in the drama that plays out in this wounded family. The narrator, and viewpoint character, is an Englishman named John. At the start of the novel we learnt that John is dissatisfied with his life as a university lecturer, and tending to become depressed with what he sees as a futile life. It is evident that he is travelling through France, where he meets a man who eerily is his double in looks; a confident French count, Jean de Gué. Intrigued despite himself, John plays along with the Count's wishes, indulging in a night of drinking, and staying in an anonymous downbeat hotel overnight. On waking, he discovers that the man has disappeared, taking all John's own clothes and belongings, and leaving him to play the role of the "Comte Jean de Gué". Thus we have the novel's basic premise.Which doesn’t mean this novel is not good — I think it’s pretty damn good. And I am glad I read it. 😊 He has inherited a troubled family, a struggling business, and another life to one side of that, all rooted in and shaped by a history that he knows nothing about. At first John feels that he has is watching a play, but of course he is an actor not a spectator. He plays the part of Jean, and that frees him from the aspects of John’s life that disappoint him and allows him to live a very different life, but that comes at a price. urn:lcp:scapegoat00duma:epub:22585892-3573-43d8-a60d-fdcd0dab8b25 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier scapegoat00duma Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t8mc9w50s Lccn 57005902 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary_edition