chauffeur believes him to be drunk and when he enquires after the 'gentleman I was with last night' (p.30) the hotel receptionist has no knowledge of him. John decides that if 'he One had no right to play about with 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 upon the struggle of the other.”

men who look exactly alike, a teacher and a wealthy business man with a complicated personal life and business in trouble meet. The teacher inhabits the life of the business man who disappears. It's quite delightful and perfectly written how he interacts with the family members and romantic entanglements of the wealth man. There he meets his doppelgänger's family: Jean's feeble, pregnant wife Françoise and over-imaginative young daughter Marie-Noel; his dull brother Paul and embittered sister Blanche; Paul's frustrated wife (and Jean's mistress) Renée; and Jean's elderly, morphine-addicted mother. As he learns about the decades of resentments and failures that haunt the family, John feels he should do something to help put things right. Since reading Du Maurier’s most celebrated novel – Rebecca– I’ve bought every single one of her publications I’ve been able to get my hands on. So much so that I now own four copies of Rebecca, three of Frenchman’s Creek and two of both Jamaica Inn and My Cousin Rachel – an impressive, though equally pointless, collection of some of her most loved books. 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.When John first stepped into Jean de Gue's life, he noticed that his mother looked frightened. His sister silent. His brother hostile. His sister-in-law angry. His wife crying, and his daughter threw a tantrum. The dog, ignored him.

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, Have you ever wanted to run away from your life? What would happen if you suddenly had the chance to; would you "grasp the nettle"? Or what if a new life was imposed on you, whether you liked it or not? Such is the premise of Daphne du Maurier's 1957 novel, The Scapegoat.

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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.” 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." The last time I wrote about a Du Maurier here very few people had read it, so I’m expecting that this is also the case with this much better book. I commend it to your attention—it’s fascinating, and a book a genre reader will really enjoy. For a start it’s a view on an alien culture—the gentry of France twelve years after the end of the Occupation. Then it’s a fascinating story of deception and discovery—the slow discovery of the circumstances of Jean de Gue’s life. Various other reviewers have offered the caveat along the lines of "suspend disbelief and read/enjoy this book." I was able to thoroughly enjoy the book without ever really needing to overcome disbelief because the storyline and its telling were so strong as to not give me any real pause. That's not to say that I'm gullible, simply that Ms. Du Maurier's narrative is as superlative as ever, possibly even better than Rebecca. Surely not? You be the judge of that. Either way, the narrative is just excellent and totally engrossing, and Paul Shelley's narration merely adds a little icing on top. Un-put-down-able, as my headline states.