The Scapegoat (Virago Modern Classics)

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Take a look around you, at all those vast legions of cynical, weary, burnt-out souls - lost in their private hells.

Two men....one English, "John"...( the narrator), the other French, "Jean de Gue", meet by chance one evening. It's like looking into a mirror: they look almost identical- other than the color of their eyes. 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. One thing I noticed and found surprising is that the book is less gothic than the other novels of hers that I've read ( Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel). There are fewer of the traditional gothic tropes on display (the house as a main character, ghosts or dead who preoccupy the minds of the characters, letters received from people long dead, animals who meet bad ends, dark eroticism). I'd say this book is more of a mystery, if I had to classify it. There are recurring themes in this novel. Take the motif of a broken ornament, for instance. 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. Here there is a similar event involving Anne-Marie and her mother, and a porcelain cat and dog, In The Scapegoat, her ancestral glass-blowing foundry became the failing business of the de Gué family. They in turn were depicted as more grand, in fact minor aristocrats, the Comte and Comtesse. And instead of writing herself into the story, the author took on the guise of a male narrator, one of five occasions in major novels when she did this.It held my interest pretty much throughout, although maybe about two-thirds of the way through my interest flagged but then accelerated again — just a minor bump in the road. Otherwise I think I would have rated it as ‘5’ rather than ‘4’…but in my rating system a ‘4’ is “a memorable read and if there is anything else the author has written I would be quite interested in it”, thank you very much. 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! 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! Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik. Daphne DuMaurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999. Print.

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! 😁 So, what happens when you come face to face with your exact double but wake up the next day only to find that he/she has switched identities with you? You might feel like you have no choice but to play along. Let the chauffeur take you home to a chateau full of depressed and embittered family members. Throw in a couple of religious fanatics just for good measure. Next, you might actually begin to think that you can help these people if you can just avoid detection long enough. I think you're getting the idea. I'm actually still a bit unnerved by this macabre tale and I will be thinking about this thriller for many days, probably weeks. What Daphne du Maurier achieved is a well-crafted and suspenseful mystery that pulled me into the story very swiftly and even though I've closed the cover I still feel like a deer staring into headlights. I can't quite pull myself away from the events and the characters, so I'm at a standstill. This story about two men who switch identities is so much more that what it seems on the surface. It brings a lot of self-introspection and often times has the reader asking, "What would I do in this situation?" The are memorable characters you won't soon (if ever) forget. The conflict is decidedly resolved in the way that works best, though, initially, I was not so sure of that.

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Two men exchange lives with seemingly devastating results. However, in retrospect it was a blessing for both. The ending left me wondering what the moral of the story was suppose to be. It passed me by somehow. However, I did find the depiction of the male characters quite satisfying indeed. Something worth considering: their expectations, responsibilities, and aspirations.

I knew that everything I had said or done had implicated me further, driven me deeper, bound me more closely still to that man whose body was not my body, whose mind was not my mind, whose thoughts and actions were a world apart, and yet whose inner substance was part of my nature, part of my secret self." 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.Having enjoyed many Daphne du Maurier books, The Scapegoat comes as a big disappointment. The premise of a stolen identity and the deception that followed sounded fantastic and was too inviting to pass. But now, I wish I had. I read it as a straight doppelganger story and still found it wonderfully complex - & du Maurier's skilled writing made me believe the unbelievable. But some of the other people doing this group read (in the Retro Reads Group) have found deeper, more spiritual & philosophical meaning in the writing and I really want to sit down and read this book all over again. Thus, what follows is a compelling and unusual story which keeps the reader guessing right until the bitter end. Sinister and gripping, Du Maurier’s writing is wonderfully atmospheric and her descriptions of the hotel in Le Mans, the grounds of Jean de Gue’s estate in the French countryside and Bella’s antique shop in the town of Villars are every bit as evocative as that of her native Cornwall. At this point just less than half-way through, the dream-like quality is notched up a step, and we realise that John is beginning to perceive another, darker, personality hidden within his own self, much as the character "Doctor Jekyll" did, but more subtly. Although Jekyll became subsumed and ultimately destroyed by the malignant influence of Hyde, John conversely seems to become more self-possessed and confident through his exploration of his darker self. He seems to become, in a sense, a more complete character, and his past a mere shadow. I'm not really sure what to take away from this novel. Main theme is greed and how it manifest in bad as well as good situations.